“Yeah . . .”
“She’s warming up to you, Winnie. Making sure you’re okay.”
Winnie had to laugh at the notion of Lovey as her protector, and laugh she did.
“I’m serious, Winnie. Animals sense when their owners are sad.”
Slowly, and with as much stealth as she could muster, Winnie snuck her hand around the bowl of pizza balls and extracted one from the side. “What makes you think I’m sad?” she asked, hiding the finger food behind her back.
“I don’t know. Maybe the circles under your eyes, the sparkle that’s been AWOL from them for the past week, the fact that the smile that’s normally plastered across your face hasn’t been seen in days . . . You know, clues like that.” Renee grabbed a small dipping cup from the first of two stacks, spooned a little pizza sauce into it, and held it out for Winnie to take. “That pizza ball you’re holding behind your back will taste a whole lot better dipped in this.”
Busted!
She took the sauce cup, dipped her pizza ball into it, and then popped it in her mouth. “Mmmm. And . . . as for . . . this notion I’m not happy”—she swallowed, helped herself to another pizza ball, and lowered it into the sauce cup—“I’m fine. I just didn’t sleep too well last night.”
“Oooh, you have your own personal refrain!”
“My own personal refrain?”
“You know, the repeating part of a song.” Renee returned to the counter and placed a stack of napkins next to the paper plates and plastic utensils that denoted the start of the buffet line.
“I know what a refrain means, Renee. I’m just not sure what it has to do with me.”
“The whole not-sleeping-well thing. It’s been a daily occurrence with you the past week.” Renee loosened the lid on the apple juice container and set it back down next to the plastic cups. “And, to a lesser degree, off and on since you met Jay. Or, rather, since Jay’s kid met you.”
Winnie looked down at her overly sauced pizza ball, her appetite gone. “Can we not talk about that right now?”
“Talk about what, or should I say, whom? Jay or Scream Queen?”
“Either.”
Cocking her head to the side, Renee pouted her lower lip. The effect, which would surely qualify as condescending on just about any other face, left Winnie wishing for a tissue and an enormous piece of chocolate. “I take it things didn’t go so well last night?”
She knew she’d have to bring her friend up to speed soon, but not now. Not when she’d promised to help make Ty’s just-because party a smashing success. She opened her mouth to say as much but closed it as her phone vibrated inside her pocket.
“Excuse me a sec.” Winnie extracted her phone, noted Jay’s name on the screen, and sent him straight to voice mail. Again. As the number beside the mailbox changed from three to four, she slipped it back into her pocket and deliberately directed her attention toward something other than her gape-mouthed friend. “Anyway, I found something interesting during the time your mime was at Charlton School of the Arts.”
Renee pulled a cheese slider off the top of the platter and nibbled her way around the sides, stopping every few seconds to shake it at Winnie. “I should protest this all-too-obvious topic change and demand you tell me what happened last night. But, in the interest of utilizing the limited time remaining before those boys come through my back door asking about food, I won’t.”
“Thank you.” Winnie pointed at what remained of Renee’s slider. “Is that good?”
Shoving the rest of the miniature hamburger into her mouth, Renee’s eyes rolled back behind her eyelids. “Uh-huh. Ur is.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Winnie teased. Then, at Renee’s nod, she helped herself to a slider, too. “Anyhoo, check this out. Your mime didn’t go to Charlton wanting to be a mime.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, his bio on the school’s website said he came in wanting to be a magician.”
“And what? He suddenly took a vow of silence?”
Winnie laughed. “I guess. Anyway, after rereading the bios of our five suspects, I decided to search the time frame each was connected with the school. Since I knew we’d be seeing George this morning, I figured I’d focus on him first. And, get this . . . During George’s last semester at the school, a beloved teacher took her own life.”
Winnie took in Renee’s gasp and continued. “Now, I know this doesn’t mean anything, but from everything I could find, this woman was a favorite among the students. Her death was so upsetting to the students, in fact, that the school borrowed grief counselors from as far away as two counties to help the kids in the wake of the news.”
“Okay . . .”
“In a news article the very next day, each and every student interviewed talked about what a wonderful teacher this woman had been. Everyone except George. He actually complained about receiving a failing grade from her the previous semester.”
Renee chased a few crumbs from her lips with a napkin and then balled it up and threw it in the trash can beneath the sink. “It’s official. I seem to fall for guys who end up being insensitive jerks. My mother should be so proud.”
“She should. Because the reason you fall for these guys is because your heart is bigger than pretty much anyone’s I’ve ever known.” She leaned forward, planted a kiss on Renee’s cheek, and then gestured toward the gaggle of boys running toward the sliding glass door. “It looks like their tummies have finally caught up to the time on the clock.”
“Grab a marker, will you? Maybe if we put names on the cups, they can hang on to them through dessert, too.”
“Good idea. But first, I’ll let them inside.” Winnie crossed to the door but paused for a moment before actually opening it. “And you’re absolutely sure you don’t need me to swing out to the retreat center and pick up George? I mean, that’s what we’d originally talked about.”
“The secretary at the center called me this morning and said she’d drop him off,” explained Renee. “So assuming that still happens, we’re good.”
“When is he supposed to be here?”
“Twelve thirty.”
Nodding, Winnie wrapped her fingers around the handle of the door and slid it open. “Okay, boys, lunch is ready!”
With one big whoosh, the gaggle of boys swarmed past her and into the kitchen with one lone exception.
“Winnie!” Renee’s only child wrapped his arms around Winnie and squeezed. “Mom said you made the desserts!”
“And Mom said you had me in the crosshairs of your water balloon fight, you little stinker.” She tickled Ty’s side and, when he jerked back with a laugh, she brushed a kiss atop his blond head. “You better watch out—revenge is sweet.”
His eyes, so much like his mother’s, sparkled at the challenge, and then he was gone, his feet running to catch up with his friends before the food disappeared. She watched him go and then turned and looked out at the backyard and the bits of colored rubber latex strewn around. For so many years she’d never allowed herself to think of being a mom. After all, she’d had little to no interest in dating for more than a decade. But once she met Jay, the thoughts had trickled in—baking sessions with a daughter, bringing homemade cookies to a son’s soccer game . . .
It had been silly, of course. She and Jay had been dating for a little over three months—three months that had been carefully scheduled and planned around a sixteen-year-old who wanted absolutely nothing to do with Winnie.
So many nights she stared up at the ceiling trying to convince herself a clean break was best for everyone involved. But every time she was sure she was going to end it with Jay, her heart reminded her why she couldn’t.
Something about Jay made her feel whole. When they were together, her laugh was truer, her smile fuller, her dreams endless. Surely that had to mean something, didn’t it?
It means you’
re pathetic, that’s what it means . . .
“Winnie? The cups?”
She shook herself back into the moment and slid the door closed. Renee was right. There was a job to do. Pulling the cap off the marker in her hand, Winnie retraced her steps back to the counter and the cups waiting to be marked with the names of Ty’s friends. “Okay, let’s get some names on these cups and then get down to eating, shall we?”
Chapter 23
“Hurry back, Mommy.” Renee moved Lovey’s front paw up and down in farewell as Winnie slowly backed the Dessert Squad down the driveway and toward the road. “I’ll miss you.”
“Not likely.”
Movement in the passenger seat pulled her attention off Renee’s front walkway and fixed it, instead, on the brown-haired, charcoal-eyed man gesturing first toward Lovey and then toward his own confused face.
“Why do I say that?” she asked.
At the mime’s emphatic nod, she answered the nonverbal question she’d apparently interpreted successfully. “That cat? Lovey? The one who took to you the other day at the lake? Yeah, she doesn’t exactly like me. And Renee knows this.”
She shifted the car into drive and headed down the street, the neighborhood roads mandating a slow, easy pace and enabling her to play what was, essentially, a game of charades with her passenger.
He mimed whiskers (cat! cat!) and then pointed at Winnie, his forehead scrunched in confusion.
“Yes, Lovey is mine. Now.” When the lines across George’s forehead didn’t budge, she filled in the blanks. “My friend Gertrude Redenbacher passed away earlier this year.”
George’s face fell in feigned sadness.
“She was old,” Winnie explained as she slowed to a stop at a four-way intersection. When she was sure the coast was clear, she turned left. “Gertie lived a long life and she was excited to join her husband, who passed a few years earlier. Anyway, when Gertie died, she left me this ambulance—which her husband had been restoring prior to his death—and Lovey.
“This ambulance enabled me to continue my dream when I was forced to close my bakery due to a landlord who raised my rent so high I could no longer stay in business. And Lovey? Well, I bought her a windowsill hammock—which she adores—all her favorite foods—which she inhales—and have even given up sleeping in my bed more times than I can count so she can have it. Yet, here we are, nearly five months later, and her favorite pastime is still hissing at me.”
Winnie stopped at the red light and, in conjunction with a sigh she hadn’t meant to be so loud, pressed the back of her head against her seat. “I actually thought she was starting to warm up to me the last few days thanks to a nearly twenty-four-hour-long cease-fire in the hissing. But she was back at it again today.”
George pointed at the traffic light a second before the car behind her blasted their horn.
“Everyone is always in such a rush, aren’t they?”
He nodded.
She drove down Main Street, stopping every few feet to allow a pedestrian to cross. “See that place right there? The Corner Pocket? That was where my bakery was up until the beginning of March.”
He pointed at the shingle with the pool hall’s name and then scrunched his forehead at her again.
“It was called Delectable Delights,” she said. “Renee worked there with me just as she does now. She makes the whole thing all the more fun.”
His forehead relaxed with a smile.
“What you saw today at Ty’s party? That’s Renee pretty much twenty-four/seven. It’s why watching her go through her divorce was so hard. She’s supposed to be laughing and smiling, you know?”
When they reached the end of the downtown shopping district, Winnie turned right toward the lake. “And she’d probably kill me for telling you this stuff. But I trust you can keep this little conversation mum, yes?”
She laughed at her own question and then quickly followed it up with a shrug and an apology. “Sorry about that. I’m betting you get that a lot from people like me who think they’re being funny. I didn’t mean any harm. Really.”
He waved her off and then moved his index finger in a backward motion.
“Rewind?” she asked.
A quick nod led to her next question. “What? The conversation?”
Again, he nodded.
“Rewind to what? Renee?”
A third nod had her smiling again. “She’s a great friend. And an even better mom. Ty is one lucky kid, I tell you.”
This time he shook his head and moved his finger in a slight forward motion.
“I rewound too far? Okay, let me think . . .” She stopped, revisited their conversation, and then picked it up in the only other area that made sense. “Her divorce with Bob?”
The nod was back.
“He traded her in for a slightly younger model.” With the words came an overwhelming need to strangle her friend’s ex. But since murder charges wouldn’t be good for business—
Murder charges . . .
Ahhh yes, the reason she nearly fell off Renee’s kitchen stool volunteering to transport George back to the retreat center in the first place . . .
Before she could steer the conversation in a direction meant to best utilize their time together, George was back to his miming.
It took a few tries, but eventually she got the gist of his question.
“Sure, Renee has had it rough. Even though the divorce isn’t her fault, she still blames herself. I keep hoping the things I say will eventually drown out the doubt-filled voices in her head, but it doesn’t always work that way.”
George’s nod was more reflective as he turned his attention on the scenery moving past his window at the forty-mile-per-hour speed limit permitted on the outlying road.
“Did you just stop talking the day you decided to become a mime?” Winnie took advantage of the empty road to really take in the man seated where Lovey usually sat. Somewhere in his mid to late thirties, George had an air of sadness about him that transcended the face paint designed to mask any real emotion. It was there in the downward slant of his shoulders, the eye contact that always seemed to lag south, and the lack of any perceptible glint in his eyes no matter how hard Ty and his friends had laughed during his show.
When he didn’t move or react, she took her questions in a slightly different direction, hoping, if nothing else, to get a reaction. “Do you at least miss talking?”
“Every day.”
His whisper, let alone its raspy quality, was so unexpected, so sudden, the tires on the right side of the ambulance actually left the edge of the road for a second or two before Winnie yanked the steering wheel to the left in compensation.
“Then . . . then, why don’t you?” She looked from the road in front of them to the rearview mirror and back again. “Talk, I mean? Between shows?”
With his face still turned toward his window, he followed up his first two words with more. “Those voices that mess with Renee’s head? Well, the ones in my head are relentless . . . and right.”
“Someone hurt you?” She checked the road ahead one more time and then took a moment to glance across the seat at her passenger.
“No.”
Confused, she returned her gaze to the road. “I don’t—”
“I’m the one who did the hurting,” he said, his tone ripe with self-loathing. “With my words . . . my lies.”
Now that he was talking, it was as if he couldn’t stop. “I destroyed her marriage, her family, her life.”
“George, I’m sure you’re overstating whatever it is that happened.”
“She’s dead. Because of me. There is no overstating that.”
Winnie felt her jaw clench in time with her hands. Did she hang a U-turn and deliver him straight to the police station? Did she ask him to repeat himself while she slyly reached into her inside jacket pocket and hit Reco
rd on her phone?
Decisions, decisions . . .
“I knew I screwed up blowing off that last test, but I wanted to fool around like the other guys did. Looking back, I should have been grateful she didn’t have me expelled for coming to class drunk that day, but all I could see was the hit to my transcript.”
Transcript?
“I was so hung up on acing all my classes that the thought of that one blight on my report card sent me into a tailspin.” He shifted in his seat but kept his face turned away. “I asked if I could do extra credit to pull my grade back up. But she said no.”
Extra credit?
“I begged and pleaded but she wouldn’t budge. And that’s when I set my revenge in motion. I took pictures of her talking to the male faculty members—innocent conversations or walks to the parking lot that I spun differently in an anonymous letter to her husband. I started the gossip that spread like wildfire around a campus of kids who had nothing better to do between classes. Eventually, based on what I heard, the husband fell for the lies and filed for divorce. According to the note they found next to her body, she simply couldn’t bear to live without him.
“My lies did that.” He whispered. “I did that.”
“Wait. You’re not talking about Sally Dearfield, are you? You’re talking about that teacher who died during your last year at Charlton, aren’t you?”
His head jerked back as if he’d been slapped. And suddenly, the eyes that seemed so void of emotion throughout Ty’s show crackled with first shock, then anger, and, finally, hurt. “You think I killed Sally?”
“I thought that’s what you were saying,” she said behind a pent-up exhale.
“I wasn’t saying that!” He stopped, raked his hand through his hair, and then shifted forward on the seat.
“Someone killed her.”
“I realize that.” He brought his hand around to his mouth for a moment before letting it drift all the way down to his lap. “She made a lot of enemies in a very short period of time. One of them obviously struck back. But it wasn’t me.”
At the entrance to the retreat house, Winnie turned but didn’t accelerate. “How did she make enemies?”
Dial M for Mousse Page 18
