Vows, Vendettas and a Little Black Dress

by Kyra Davis

  It would have been so much easier to take the binders. Reluctantly I offered my hand to my nephew, who immediately took it and then dropped to the ground, a move that almost ripped my arm out of my socket.

  He seemed to think he was being incredibly funny. “Mommy, I almost made Auntie Sophie fall down!”

  “Don’t torture your aunt,” Leah snapped. “Only the grown-ups in our family get to do that.”

  “Hey, that’s…” But I didn’t know how to finish my complaint since as far as I could tell Leah had pretty much hit the nail on the head.

  “How ’bout you, Sophie?” Monty asked. “Will you stay for pizza and a movie?”

  “I’m actually supposed to meet Anatoly at Yoshi’s. Plus you and Mary Ann deserve some alone time.” I shot Mary Ann a meaningful look. If she was going to tell Monty about the afternoon events she really should do it soon. “Call me if anything comes up.”

  “What would come up?” Monty asked. “You mean in regards to Dena?”

  “Yeah, ’course.” I gave Jack a gentle tug. “Come on, Jack, let’s get going. And remember, no torture.”

  “’Cause torture’s for grown-ups,” Jack said solemnly.

  “Yes, well, at least it’s something we like to reserve for people who are old enough to date.”

  Leah nodded and then, with a certain amount of reluctance, offered Mary Ann a very small smile. “Dena will be fine. She’s a fighter and as soon as she figures out what she’s fighting against she’ll find her motivation to overcome all this.”

  “Thank you, Leah,” Mary Ann breathed.

  Leah nodded again and led the way out into the cooling air of early evening. She stopped a few paces outside the front door. “So tell me the truth. What did you mean when you asked her to call you if anything came up?”

  “Um…well.” I looked down at Jack. He wasn’t yanking my arm anymore but he was swinging it back and forth with enough force to cause a slight breeze. “Okay, Mary Ann and I were walking through Buena Vista Park and I think someone might have shot a squirrel out of a tree while using a silencer.”

  “Someone shot a squirrel?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not sure that was the target. It didn’t look like the kind of squirrel that would have a lot of enemies.”

  “Do you think they were aiming at you?”

  “No,” I said truthfully. Somewhere to my right I heard the calling of a crow. I half expected it to say “Nevermore.”

  “But you saw it happen.” Leah looked at me coolly. “You were a witness to another shooting.”

  “Yes. A squirrel shooting.”

  “And the squirrel died?”

  “I believe so, yes. It was a homicide.”

  Leah sighed and shook her head. “Our lives are a mess. People keep shooting guns in your vicinity and I can’t get Mary Ann and Monty to let me plan their wedding.”

  “Okay, seriously? You’re comparing your inability to land a job as a wedding coordinator to my getting shot at?”

  “You just said that no one has been shooting at you. They’re shooting around you and don’t diminish my plight! You said you were going to help me convince Mary Ann to hire me but you’ve done nothing!”

  “Leah, what do you want me to do? You heard them. They want Disneyland.”

  “Well, they can’t have it!”

  “Apparently Mickey says they can and he’s the boss.”

  “Mickey Mouse’s the boss?” Jack asked as he struggled to keep up.

  “No, sweetie. Mice can’t be bosses and they can’t throw weddings. Not properly.”

  “You know Leah, this wedding could be fun…except for the shiny peach dresses—that really needs to change—but other than that the whole thing should be incredibly entertaining. I mean it’s Disneyland without the crowds. You can’t beat that, right?”

  “Yes, I can!” she growled. She turned and walked up to her car as Jack and I followed close at her heels.

  I put Jack in his car seat as Leah put the binders in the trunk. As she opened her driver’s-side door she paused for a moment. “How will Dena feel about the shiny peach dresses?”

  I shuddered. “It’s going to be a problem.”

  “Right.” A mysterious little smile played on Leah’s lips. “Well, I won’t keep you. Good to see you, Sophie, and please try to stay out of the line of fire.”

  “I’ll give it a shot. Oh, hey, I just made a pun! Get it, shot?”

  Leah gave me a withering look before getting in her car and driving off. I smiled to myself. This torture stuff worked both ways.

  CHAPTER 16

  I believe good communication is essential for a healthy relationship. By that, I mean my partner should only tell me the good things I want to hear.

  –Fatally Yours

  I found myself checking my rearview mirror a lot on the way to Yoshi’s. The sun was low but it wasn’t dark yet. Monty had a killer security system so Mary Ann was probably safe. Probably safe. God, that wasn’t reassuring at all! But I had to believe it was going to be okay. Or did that make me like Monty, clinging to some fairy-tale fantasy about life? And even if this was a fairy tale it seemed pretty clear that Mary Ann was the princess. So what did that make me? The friend who tragically dies while protecting her?

  I stepped on the gas. The sooner I was off these dark neighborhood streets the better.

  I was the first to arrive at Yoshi’s. I scored us a table and I tried to relax as I watched the door. How could I be here at a restaurant with tickets to a show just hours after I had been shot at?

  But what was the alternative? Sitting home alone? That didn’t sound wise at all.

  I stared up at the rice-paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling. The whole decor was festive and dramatic. Maybe there was something to celebrate here. For one thing I was going to be straight with Anatoly about what had happened this afternoon. Lately I had been feeling that there were too many secrets tucked into the corners of my relationship with Anatoly and I knew that was at least partially my fault. There had been so many times when I had kept things from him, particularly when it came to life-or-death situations, and if you think about it those are exactly the kind of situations you should really talk to your partner about.

  So by being forthcoming I was going to bring our relationship to the next level. It was too bad that it took a gunman to bring me to this point but hey, not everything can be perfect.

  Anatoly walked into the lounge. The ceilings were forty-five feet high but for some reason when he walked into the room it became intimate. Unlike the other patrons he didn’t have to scan the space when he entered. He saw me immediately and crossed directly to my table. I loved that.

  “I got your message,” he said as he sat down opposite me.

  “What message?”

  “About Amelia.”

  I think my mouth dropped open. Not because it was so shocking that Anatoly would take the time to listen to his voice mail but because it seemed impossible that I had left that message less than six hours ago. Since then my view on the entire situation had completely changed.

  “I’m not all that worried about Amelia right now,” I managed.

  “I am.”

  I shook my head. This was like talking about the plight of the panda bears in China right after you’ve survived a 7.0 earthquake in San Francisco. There simply wasn’t a connection, and while you could argue the first issue was important it didn’t even come close to mirroring the urgency of the latter.

  “If you still think she shot Dena I can tell you right now she didn’t.” I took a deep breath. Now was the time to launch into my story about Buena Vista Park. But before I could exhale Anatoly was already launching into a whole different conversation.

  “I went to see Jason today.”

  “You did?” The waitress came by to take our order. Anatoly hadn’t even looked at the menu but we both pretty much knew it by heart anyway. We ordered the sashimi go and nigiri nana and I threw in a saketini because I was beginning to susp
ect I was going to need it.

  “I didn’t tell him my suspicions,” he continued the minute our waiter walked away. “But I did talk to him about Amelia and his relationship with her.”

  “What did he say?” I asked, momentarily forgetting that I was supposed to change the subject.

  “He thinks Amelia’s been uncharacteristically aggressive lately, almost to the point of being unstable. I was also able to help him track down Kim.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  Anatoly shook his head. “He knew what towns Amelia and Kim had originally planned to visit. He just wasn’t sure about some of the hotels. I spent a good portion of the afternoon calling the wrong places but I finally found the hostel where he’s at.”

  “How did you do that? You don’t even speak Spanish.”

  Anatoly hesitated. The music switched from instrumental jazz to Ella Fitzgerald. “I speak a little Spanish.”

  “What?”

  “Sophie, what I’m trying to tell you is that I spoke with Kim and he says Amelia was very angry the last time he saw her. That was only one day before the shooting.”

  Ella Fitzgerald was chastising some guy for leaving her and the noise level of the lounge was rising with the steady inflow of patrons rushing to take advantage of the happy-hour prices. But to me the sounds seemed to melt together into a mournful, inebriated hum. I leaned forward in my seat. “You speak Spanish?”

  “That’s not the issue right now. Kim was understandably upset when I told him what had happened to Dena and he’s coming back as soon as he can get to a town with an airport. But before he hung up I was able to get him to talk about his last conversation with Amelia. She accused Dena of having cast a spell over Kim and Jason. She said she was going to kill her, Sophie.”

  I squeezed my eyes closed as reality pressed its way into my brain and then pressed down on my heart like a cement weight. “I can’t believe this,” I whispered. “We’ve been going out for years and you never told me you spoke Spanish.”

  I opened my eyes in time to see Anatoly slam his hand on the table in frustration. “Why would I tell you I spoke Spanish? You don’t speak Spanish and no one we hang out with speaks it in their day-to-day life so how would this have come up?”

  “Oh, my God, are you serious? This is what couples do! They talk about things they don’t need to talk about! I don’t mean things like ‘how do you really feel about me?’ and all that Dr. Drew stuff. I mean we’re supposed to be swapping childhood stories. You should want me to know what your school experience was like in Russia. What it was like to emigrate to Israel and then to the States. You should want me to know that you speak not one, not two, not three but four friggin’ languages! I mean Spanish!” I threw up my hands in defeat. “It’s like you don’t want me to know who you are at all!”

  “Sophie, I think Amelia shot Dena.”

  “Bullshit. And we’re not talking about that right now anyway.”

  “Very well. But I am going to be talking about it with the police tomorrow.”

  “Wait, what?” Our waiter came back with our drinks. I clasped the stem of my martini glass as if it was a handle of a knife. “Anatoly, we have a deal,” I hissed once our waitress had moved away.

  “The deal was that I was going to wait until I found more reason to suspect her.”

  “What reason would that be? That she said she wanted to kill Dena? It’s an expression! I say it all the time! Right now I’d like to wring your friggin’ neck—does that make me the San Franciscan version of the Boston Strangler?” My drink sloshed over the edge of the glass and I grabbed a napkin to wipe up the sticky liquid from my hand.

  “You’re right, it is a common expression. But you pair that with the fact that she clearly saw Dena as a threat to her relationship with the men in her life and she let everyone think she was out of the country at the time Dena got shot.” Anatoly shrugged and took a swig of his Michelob. “The police should be looking into this, Sophie, and time is of the essence in these kinds of cases.”

  “But she didn’t let everybody think she was out of the country! She went to work!”

  “That’s another thing. I spoke to Amelia’s boss.”

  “YOU WHAT?” I said the words louder than I intended and the woman at the next table looked in our direction and then hurriedly whispered something to her companion, who observed us in a manner that she probably thought was discreet.

  “Amelia never called in a request to be added to the schedule after she decided to stay in the States.” His tone and demeanor were matter-of-fact, so much so that the women at the neighboring table immediately lost interest in us. “Amelia and her boss, Brooke, are friends,” he continued, “so when Brooke drove by Amelia’s apartment at eleven o’clock at night this last Sunday and saw that the lights were on she understandably went to investigate. That’s when she discovered Amelia never went to Nicaragua. Amelia only agreed to come into work the next day to soothe Brooke’s hurt feelings about being kept in the dark.”

  “So she didn’t want to come into work, big deal. It’s called a staycation.”

  “Again the problem becomes evident when you start adding all these little things up.” Anatoly frowned as a man wearing an exorbitant amount of cologne passed by our table. “Also, according to Brooke, Amelia seemed very calm and collected that night.”

  “And that’s a bad thing because…?”

  “Didn’t Amelia tell you that she got Jason’s messages? She knew what had happened to Dena and still she was calm…and she didn’t go to the hospital.”

  “If she was calm, it was probably because she had smoked herself into a stoned state of tranquility. Anatoly, you’re just going to have to take my word for it when I tell you she didn’t shoot Dena. Okay?”

  “No. Sophie, I can’t take your word on this because this is the exactly the type of thing you usually lie to me about.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. You decide you know what’s the best way to approach an investigation and then you try to find ways to keep me in the dark so you can handle things yourself.”

  “Uh-uh, it doesn’t work like that.” I jabbed my finger in the air threateningly. “You don’t get to talk to me about all the times I’ve tried to mislead you or hide things from you. You’re the one who can order chilaquiles on Mission without a translator! I mean, who knew?”

  “Are you suggesting that my neglect to tell you that I speak Spanish is the equivalent to your not telling me that you were planning on breaking into the home of a potential killer?”

  “Oh, come on, I haven’t broken into anybody’s house in years, and I certainly don’t plan on doing it again. I want to catch Dena’s shooter more than anything and if I thought there was even the slightest chance Amelia was guilty I would tell you.” I took a deep breath. “But to answer your question, in the terms of our relationship hiding your linguistic skills is on par with my previous attempts to hide my ill-conceived plans that could have conceivably gotten me killed.”

  Anatoly just stared at me.

  “Look, you know that if something goes down I’m going to stick my nose in it no matter what I tell you. That’s who I am. You expect it because you know me. But what can I expect of you, Anatoly? Anything? Nothing? Please enlighten me because I’m dying to know.”

  Anatoly sighed loudly and took another swig of beer. “This conversation is going nowhere. Why don’t we just agree to stop talking about Amelia and Spanish and anything else that has to do with the case or my linguistic skills and just enjoy our sushi?”

  “Fine but you can’t tell the police about Amelia.”

  “Sophie—”

  “Maybe it was Kim!”

  “He was out of the country. I checked and the airline records show he boarded the plane a day before the shooting.”

  “How the hell did you get your hands on the airline’s records?”

  Anatoly hesitated. “I…have some rather powerful, and illicit, connections
.”

  “Powerful and…” I shook my head and threw my hands in the air. “Who says shit like that? Who the hell are you! Russian mafia?”

  “That’s not funny, Sophie.”

  “Yeah, well, neither is accusing an innocent woman of attempted murder, and now you’ve made her boss suspicious of her, too! You know the fact that Amelia seemed calm is not evidence! It’s called being in a state of shock, Anatoly. Now you promised me a week and the least you can do is give me that!”

  Anatoly’s eyes narrowed. “And you won’t do anything reckless during this week? That’s hard for me to believe seeing that you just told me that sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong is an ingrained personality trait.”

  I sucked in a sharp breath. This was not going the way I wanted it to at all. “New deal,” I said carefully. “I promise to never bring up your Spanish-speaking abilities again if you promise to at least try to trust me this one time when I tell you I am not planning a B and E. That means you can’t be checking up on me all the time. You have to just believe me.”

  “I don’t like this deal.”

  “Well, I don’t really need you to like it. I just need you to try to settle for it.”

  I knew Anatoly wasn’t going to go for this. If the choice was between talking about his Spanish and turning a blind eye to one of my Nancy Drew schemes we’d probably be cruising South America by tonight. But that was the point. The truth was that I didn’t really have a Nancy Drew scheme at the moment so it didn’t matter if he tried to uncover one, and I wanted to talk about his Spanish abilities. I wanted to talk about who he was and why he wouldn’t let me in.

  “Okay, it’s a deal,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” This was very, very wrong.

  “I accept your deal.”

  The waitress came back with our sushi combos and he skillfully secured a maguro roll between his chopsticks before devouring it.

  And just like that I decided not to tell him anything. Of course I’d have to tell him about my new suspicions of Fawn and Rick before the night was over because it might help get him off Amelia’s back but I wasn’t at all sure if I would tell him about Buena Vista Park. I knew it was a stupid and potentially dangerous decision, one based entirely on emotion and not at all on logic. But I was tired of being berated for not revealing everything while he revealed nothing. So we ate our sushi, we talked about politics and music. We went to see the jazz band and we pretended that we trusted each other.