Sophie pushed away her half-eaten meal. “Now I really have lost my appetite.”
“Me too.” Plus I had no desire to sit there and listen to Lee’s fans fawn all over her while her publicist’s assistant tried to hurry them along.
“Let’s meet for a drink soon.” She got to her feet. “I’m buying.”
“I’ll hold you to that. Go,” I told her, knowing she had to get back to her office at the Town Hall. “I’ll bus the table.”
After I’d deposited our trash in the bin, I started for the exit, stopping when I spied Detective Cookie Kaplan waiting at the counter for her order. Today’s earrings were red-and-black glass ladybugs.
After we exchanged greetings, I said, “I hope you’re not thinking of trying to eat here.”
“No, just picking up takeout. What a zoo.”
“Lee Romano is a real draw,” I said.
“Not for me.” Cookie accepted her change and a white paper sack from the young man behind the counter.
I was glad to hear it, though unsurprised. Cookie Kaplan didn’t strike me as a Romano Files kind of gal. “Listen,” I said, “do you have a moment? I was thinking about giving you a call.”
“Sure. Let’s find someplace quieter.”
We ended up in a small room in the back of the book section of the store, which had been turned into a sort of mini greeting-card shop, with hundreds of unique and artistic cards arranged in racks. We were the only customers in that area, and the relative quiet after the pandemonium of the café went to my head like wine.
I jumped right in. “It’s about Allison Zaleski.”
She pushed her glasses up her nose. “How did I know you weren’t finished with her?”
I felt my face heat. Last Saturday I’d asked Cookie and Howie to stop questioning people about Allison, which they’d only been doing as a favor to me.
“I don’t want you to do anything. I just have a question, and I’m thinking you might know the answer.” I’d decided to approach Cookie with this because the two of us had hit it off so readily, and she seemed a bit more flexible than Howie. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve known Howie a long time, I’m one of his biggest fans, but he can be a little too by-the-book. There are times when by-the-book doesn’t really work for me.
The level look she gave me wasn’t unkind. “It was an accident, Jane.”
“I know. I know that.” At this point I knew no such thing, but it would do me no good to share my unformed suspicions with her. I didn’t want to be branded as a total kook this early in our friendship. Borderline kook was bad enough.
And what did I know anyway? That Skye and Brenda had been acquainted last June. More than acquainted—Skye had been inside Brenda’s home. Which meant she and Allison’s stepdaughter must have known each other fairly well before pretending to meet for the first time during Allison’s funeral reception.
I supposed it was possible Allison had introduced them, but her video diary seemed to suggest that she and Mitchell had seen his daughter and her family only on the occasional holiday or birthday. These were, by her account, uncomfortable get-togethers and certainly not occasions when she would have brought along tiresome hanger-on Skye.
And in the unlikely event Allison had introduced Skye and Brenda back then, why the playacting when they met after her death? It didn’t add up.
Cookie said, “Didn’t Allison’s mother ask you to stop looking into her death?”
I nodded. “I’m not, you know, doing that. Um, looking into her death.” You could have fried an egg on my cheeks, they felt that hot.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
Yeah, I was lying to a detective, and doing a miserable job of it.
“I’m just curious about something,” I said. “Do you know whether they found Allison’s camera on her? After they, um, retrieved her body from the lake?”
Cookie looked like she didn’t want to answer. Probably didn’t want to encourage my delusions. But something tipped the equation in my favor, because she said, “After our conversation at Murray’s, I read through her files. She had a few personal items in her pockets, but no camera.”
“I’ve been told she always carried one,” I said. “I mean, when she was anywhere she might want to take pictures. She definitely would have had one in the woods that day.”
“Then it’s at the bottom of the lake.”
“Maybe. I know she packed two cameras for her trip.” At Cookie’s questioning look, I added, “It was in those videos she made. Remember, I told you about them?”
“Oh. Right. About those videos. How did you get your hands on—”
“One of the cameras,” I quickly interjected, “was small. Compact, you know? A Fuji point-and-shoot, she called it.”
“That was found in her luggage,” she said, “in the trunk of her car.”
“The other camera she was bringing on the trip was a Nikon. It had a neck strap, which she would have been using because it’s a substantial camera, a lot bigger than the Fuji.”
Cookie was already shaking her head. “We only found the Fuji.”
“Then she almost certainly had the Nikon with her in the woods.”
She shrugged. “Bottom of the lake, like I said.”
“Even with the neck strap? I mean, I know she would have been struggling, trying to get out of the water and back onto the ice.” I couldn’t stand to think about it. What a terrible way to go. The panic. The desperation. “But unless she deliberately removed the camera from around her neck—and why would she waste precious seconds doing that?—I’m thinking it would have remained with her body.”
“You’re wondering where it is and what images are on it,” Cookie said.
“Well... I’m curious, like I said.” I didn’t add what I’d been thinking, which is that a second person—her hiking companion, perhaps?—could have forced her to relinquish the camera before chasing her onto the thin ice.
“Nothing wrong with curiosity.” The look she gave me was too knowing. “As long as it doesn’t cause the curious to do something stupid.”
13
#SnackStatus #CottageCheese
AFTER MY UNSATISFYING lunch at the bookstore, I went home but found it impossible to concentrate on the Death Diva assignment I was researching for a prospective client. Hank was a fortyish stockbroker who lived in a Crystal Harbor McMansion with his wife and twin toddlers. His dad had recently died and been cremated. Hank had decided that the best way to commemorate Hank Senior’s life was to have a large portrait of him tattooed onto his own back. The photo he wanted the artist to copy was a snapshot taken in Vietnam decades earlier of a very young Hank Senior wearing army fatigues and leaning on a Jeep.
Why involve the Death Diva? you ask. Isn’t that a job for a tattoo artist? Right you are, but not just any tattoo artist would do—not when the client wanted the old man’s ashes incorporated into the tattoo ink.
No, I did not make that up. Turns out it’s a thing! So that your loved one can be part of you forever and ever and all that. For obvious reasons, though, it’s not a thing you’d want to entrust to any old tattoo parlor.
Oh, please. It’s nowhere near the weirdest thing I’ve been asked to do. Not to mention it’s legal, a big plus.
So there I was, sitting at my computer struggling to compile a list of tattoo artists who possessed not only oodles of talent but actual hands-on experience with this particular, um, ingredient, and all I could think about was Skye and Brenda, who’d suddenly morphed from being virtual strangers into... into I don’t know what. Friends? Acquaintances?
Coconspirators?
Plus, where the heck was Allison’s Nikon?
I checked the time on my laptop’s screen: 3:36 p.m. The day was turning into a total waste.
I closed the computer, snatched up my jacket and purse from the day bed, and detoured to the family room to give Sexy Beast some scritches and admonish him to behave in my absence. SB reclined in indolent luxury in a nest of throw pillows on the ivory leath
er sofa, watching Sesame Street on the enormous TV screen. It was his favorite show. He didn’t seem to mind that I kept the sound muted.
Suddenly he lifted his little head and emitted a low growl. I knew what had prompted it even before I turned to see Mr. Snuffleupagus shuffle onto the screen. The growls turned into outraged barks as Sexy Beast came to stiff attention and sprang off the sofa. He stood in front of the television, tail raised, giving the seven-foot-tall mammoth puppet what for.
“You tell him, SB.” I pushed my arms into the sleeves of my cream-colored anorak and zipped it. “Don’t let him get away with that. Who does he think he is?”
This prompted an even more frenzied burst of barking. Of all the puppets on the show, Snuffy is the only one that pushes my dog’s buttons. It didn’t take me long to figure out why. It’s because Snuffy walks on four legs. In Sexy Beast’s version of reality, four legs equals dog, and dogs are to be barked at. Including ginormous, furry dogs with enviably long eyelashes and prehensile trunks.
It’s not just Snuffy who gets this treatment. That rhino on the nature channel? Dog. Those wild pigs on Let’s Go Shoot Us Some Wild Pigs? Dogs. Wile E. Coyote? Well, duh. The Roadrunner? Probably not a dog, but suspicious enough to warrant a strict warning.
He was still carrying on as I retraced my steps through the kitchen and back down the hallway. The entrance to the garage was opposite the laundry room. My red Mazda, which I’d bought used a few months earlier, looked lonely and, let’s face it, a little shabby in this cavernous space meant to house three luxury vehicles.
I would have left the car in front of the house if it hadn’t started snowing again by the time I left the bookstore. The forecast was for one to three inches, which didn’t sound like much until you added it to the past days’ accumulation. It hadn’t been all that cold the past couple of weeks, just cold enough to keep the white stuff from melting. Spring couldn’t come soon enough, I thought as I steered down the long cobblestone drive to the street.
I know you’re wondering where I was going. I was wondering the same thing—until I realized I was driving toward Brenda Yates’s house. It shouldn’t have surprised me, considering how much I’d been obsessing about her and Skye since the previous night’s surprising discovery of a connection between the two of them.
I rolled to a stop a couple of doors down from Brenda’s house and contemplated my next move. Do I knock on the door? Would she even let me in? Probably not. Our last meeting had been strained, to say the least. Clearly I wasn’t on her list of favorite people.
As I stared at her house, the garage door began to rise. Her husband was likely at work, which meant she was probably on her way out. Sure enough, a blue Volvo station wagon rolled down the driveway and turned onto the street, in my direction, with Brenda at the wheel.
I did that thing you see people do on TV all the time, scrunching down and averting my face so she wouldn’t notice me. Because there’s nothing at all suspicious about a driver scrunching down and averting her face. Happily, her car never slowed. She kept her eyes on the road, like a good, safe driver.
Once she’d passed me, I executed a three-point turn—okay, so it was more like a seven-point turn, whatever—and followed her car at a distance, turning whenever she did. At no point did I see her glance in her rearview. Well, most people aren’t expecting to be followed, right? I mean, this was real life, and in real life you’re generally in no danger of being tailed by frustrated, bored Death Divas who have nothing better to do. Or who do have something better to do but prefer to play Janey Delaney, girl detective, instead.
She gunned it at a yellow light, trapping me as it turned red, but I’d already memorized her license plate in case we got separated. Ha! I so could have been a private investigator. If the Death Diva gig ever gets old, maybe Ben Ralston will take me on as an apprentice.
I caught up with Brenda easily and watched her pull into the the main parking lot of the local Long Island Railroad station, which is usually filled with commuters’ vehicles by 6:30 a.m. A few spots tend to open up in the afternoon, though, and sure enough, a handful were available. I watched her pass three perfectly good spots in order to park under a lamppost. Clearly she anticipated returning after dark and felt safer approaching a well-lit vehicle. That’s the sort of sensible planning I never do. Maybe it had something to do with Brenda being a mother. You start thinking, What if someone conks me on the head in the LIRR parking lot? What will happen to my kids?
This train of thought could reliably be counted on to depress yours truly, a childless woman on the cusp of middle age, so I forcefully expunged it and concentrated on my quarry. As I pulled into a spot some distance from her Volvo, I saw her exit the car, beep it, and make her cautious way over packed, sanded snow to the ticket machine sheltered next to the escalator under the trestle.
I waited until she’d taken the moving stairs up to the platform before getting out of my car. There are two main choices for train travel on the Island: points west, the most prominent being Manhattan, a ride of an hour and a half from Crystal Harbor; and points east, with myriad towns along the way, culminating in Montauk on the far east end of our very Long Island.
The chance that Brenda was taking a train somewhere east of us, when she had the option of driving, was practically zero. On the other hand, most Long Islanders who are headed to Manhattan for an evening out prefer to rely on public transportation than to drive in and deal with such delights as congested midtown traffic and ungodly parking rates—especially with snow coming down. I thus calculated there was approximately a 99.99999% chance she was headed into the city. At the machine I bought a round-trip ticket to Manhattan.
Once on the elevated, wind-whipped platform, I snugged my jacket’s hood around my face, partly for protection against the elements but also to keep Brenda from noticing me. For the same reason, I avoided the heated waiting room, now occupied by a half dozen travelers. Keeping out of sight, I spied her in there, standing near the wall of windows, as if willing the train to come faster. I assumed she avoided the less-than-pristine bench seats out of concern for her pale blue overcoat. A navy wool scarf was tucked at her throat. She wore a navy slouchy beret and navy leather gloves, all very matchy-matchy.
The electronic sign that announces departure times told me the westbound train would arrive in nine minutes. Nine minutes doesn’t sound like a long time, but it sure feels like it when you’re standing out in the open, huddled against wind-driven flurries. Only two other people, a teenage couple, chose to remain outdoors rather than inside the waiting room, and they were actively keeping each other toasty.
After standing there shivering for what felt more like nine hours than nine minutes, I finally spied the train’s headlight in the distance. My half dozen fellow travelers emerged from the waiting room to join me on the platform. I hung back, keeping my face averted as Brenda boarded. The car held about a half dozen people, well spread out. For those going in the opposite direction, from the city to the Island, it was rush hour, the train cars packed with commuters returning from work. But our westbound train was mostly empty.
Once inside, I made out the back of Brenda’s head in the middle of the car. She’d chosen a seat next to a window on a two-person bench. As I passed her, I casually glanced down, pasted on Surprised! and Delighted!, and squealed, “Brenda! Hi!”
She appeared Surprised! and Not Delighted! as I shoved her purse aside and plopped my fanny on the seat next to hers. “So,” I said. “Fun evening planned in the city?”
She pulled her purse onto her lap and scooted a little closer to the window. “I’m meeting my friend Donna for dinner and the theater. Les Mis.” After a moment she remembered to be polite. “And you?”
“Oh, an old friend is coming down from Connecticut. We’re getting together at a jazz club.” Yeah, yeah, I know what I said about lying. Do you have to pay such close attention?
Brenda’s response was a terse nod.
Now that I was sitting next to her, n
ow that she was a captive audience, so to speak, and too ladylike to shove past me and move to another car, I had no firm plan for how to proceed. Which didn’t stop me from charging ahead.
“It’s so funny running into you like this,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about you.”
A stiff half smile. “Oh?”
“Well, I mean, you’ve been through so much the past few months. First losing your dad, then your stepmother. Oh, but I forgot. You think she killed him. Pushed him into the ravine, right?”
I wasn’t worried about being overheard. No one was sitting close enough to hear our conversation over the rumbling of the train.
Rather than take the bait, she said, “I never think of my father’s second wife as my stepmother. I am, after all, several years older than her.”
“Yeah, that had to be awkward, am I right?” I said. “Your father marrying someone that young?”
“That was his business. He was free to live his life as he pleased.” She opened her purse and withdrew a paperback book titled Lose the Clutter and Love Your Life! She opened it to a page marked with a pretty, bejeweled bookmark. “Excuse me, but I was looking forward to some quiet time to catch up on my read—”
“Why didn’t you want anyone knowing about you and Skye Guthrie?” I asked. And yeah, it might have been better to gradually work my way around to it, but instinct told me that opening my big yap and blurting it out was the way to go. Staring into Brenda’s startled eyes, I hoped I hadn’t just blown it. Instinct can be such a pushy broad.
“I—I beg your pardon?”
“Skye,” I said pleasantly, as I pulled out my phone and tapped the Facebook icon. “Allison’s friend? You know, the woman you supposedly met for the first time at the funeral reception? I mean, how many Skyes do you know?”
“I met several of Allison’s friends and relations that day,” Brenda said stiffly. “I’m sorry, but I don’t specifically recall—”
Icing Allison Page 16
