Shades of Stars (Lola Pink Mysteries Book 2)

by Gina LaManna

  I gave him a nod of confirmation. “You’ve got this, Richard. I’m rooting for you.”

  “Thanks, Lola. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”

  To my surprise, I found that the weasley little red head did have me rooting for him. Something in his persistence had suckered me into caring about how things ended between him and Stephanie. He was rough around the edges, but his intentions were good.

  “Oh, one more thing,” I said as I walked him to the door. “That list of jokes you wrote out to use when you see her?”

  His hand went protectively to his pocket. “What about it?”

  I wiggled my fingers in a gimme sort of motion. “Fork it over.”

  “But—”

  “Now.”

  With a final heave of his chest, Richard handed over the jokes. “Don’t use them,” he warned. “They’re mine. I’ve copyrighted them. I want them back with the rest of my things.”

  I took once glance at the jokes and made the easiest promise of my life. “I’d never dream of using these.”

  “Hey, Lola,” he asked tentatively as he spun to face me on the front steps, “can I call you later to analyze how it went?”

  “You can call, but you can’t break into my house.”

  “We have a deal.”

  Chapter 20

  BY THE TIME I’D OFFICIALLY returned to the waking world, I’d grabbed a few more hours of sleep—but still not enough. I’d tossed and turned after Richard’s visit, finally giving in to the pull of coffee just after six. I was dressed and ready for work by seven—entirely too early to do much of anything except putter around the place.

  Johnny showed up to work just after seven, and I’d annoyed him with my questions by quarter after. I left the house around seven thirty and rode my bike over to Babs’s office. As I suspected, she’d arrived early and was already there when I parked outside and stole a cup of coffee from her machine.

  “You’re not hanging out here for an hour.” Babs pushed a pair of no-nonsense glasses up onto her nose. She barely qualified for a prescription, but she liked to keep a pair of specs on hand just in case she needed to look ‘more like a lawyer’—her words, not mine. “You’re driving me crazy pacing around here like that.”

  I sat, sighed, and studied Babs. She was the curviest, most stylish lawyer I’d ever seen, and her specs made her look more like a sexy librarian than they did a lawyer—but I wouldn’t tell her that. I watched her work for a few minutes, tapping my fingers against the edge of the mug, still agitated.

  “I wish I had a car,” I said. “Not that I actually want one, but—”

  Babs held up her keys. “Get out of here. Sorry I can’t join you. I’ve got a meeting at nine, and I can’t be late.”

  “Thank you, thank you!” I leapt up, snatched the keys from her hand, and hustled outside after a quick refill of stolen coffee.

  Holding the mug in one hand, I slipped behind the wheel of Babs’s car and clocked in a now-familiar address on my phone’s GPS. Then I turned the car toward a place I didn’t have a strong desire to go. But I needed some answers, and my questions wouldn’t ask themselves.

  My trip to Glassrock was precarious at best. I was an out-of-practice driver on a good day, and today wasn’t a good day. I had the added challenge of attempting to operate the vehicle with only one hand, due to the coffee mug I held in my other, and its inability to fit in the stupid cup holder.

  After enduring a snail’s paced drive and the honks from frustrated drivers behind me, I pulled into the rundown parking lot outside of the Rickers’s ramshackle home, pulling Babs’s car up behind the brand-new Tesla I’d seen debuted at their daughter’s funeral.

  As I stepped from my car, I frowned at the sight of boxes on top of boxes stacked outside on the small patch of grass that counted as a lawn. Someone was on their way out of here, and that someone was moving quickly.

  “Hello?” I picked my way over a box of pots and pans and stepped around a tattered armchair with a sign on it that said TAKE ME. “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Ricker?”

  Mrs. Ricker stuck her head out from the front door, her eyes widening as she recognized me. She stood, wiped her hands against the threadbare apron she wore, and leaned against the doorframe. “Can I help you? Again?”

  I offered a smile and aimed for politeness. “Hi Amaliyah, you might remember me from the other day—I came to visit with a friend of mine. Or,” I said, dodging something strewn across the grass that looked like an old batch of stew. “You might remember me from yesterday at your daughter’s funeral.”

  Amaliyah’s eyes hardened. “I remember you—the nosy one. What are you doing here?”

  “Are you and your husband moving?” I asked. “You didn’t mention anything the other day. Where are you headed?”

  “The nosy one,” she repeated, her jaw tightening. “What can I help you with?”

  “I was hoping you could clarify something for me.” I stopped my forward progression a few feet away from the front steps leading to their home. To meet Amaliyah’s eyes, I had to look up at her perched above me, and it made me uncomfortable to see the large block of knives sitting on the counter behind her. “I’m sorry about being nosy. If you’ll remember, I’m looking into your daughter’s murder.”

  “You’re not a cop.”

  “No, but I care about what happened to your daughter.”

  “It doesn’t seem like you knew her all that well.”

  “I didn’t, but I know my boss, and he’s being framed for her murder. He didn’t do it.”

  She tilted her nose upward. “How can you be so sure about that?”

  “I know him.” I swallowed hard. “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “You’re in love with him,” Amaliyah said in a moment of stark clarity. “I can hear it in your voice. Love blinds, you know. Remember that. Are you sure you know him as well as you think?”

  I pushed past the flickering doubts about Dane Clark—the reality that he kept a barrel of secrets I knew nothing about, and probably other barrels of secrets that I didn’t even know existed. “This is about Andrea, not me—not even Dane. Unless...there’s a reason you don’t want me to find out what happened to her?”

  The edge on my words set something off in Mrs. Ricker. She threw the door open, letting it bang freely against the wall behind her before she took the steps down one huff at a time. She moved right into my space bubble and held a finger just under my nose. “I understand when I’m being threatened, missy, and I don’t like what you’re insinuating.”

  “I’m not insinuating anything—I’m just asking questions and trying to do a good job.”

  “Well it’s not your job, so maybe you should let sleeping dogs lie. We’ve put Andrea to rest. We’ve come to peace with her being gone, now let us move on. Do you have children?”

  At the abrupt change of subject, I shook my head.

  “Then don’t talk to me as if you know what it’s like to lose a child.” There was a pinch of venom in her voice, though whether it was directed at me or reminiscent of something deeper, something darker in her, I couldn’t say. “You come here hinting that I might have something to do with my daughter’s death? I should have you arrested or thrown out of here. You’re not the cops, and I’m not required to talk to you, so get off my property.”

  With a sinking feeling, I realized I’d gone at this all wrong. I’d let my suspicions get the best of me and jumped to conclusions. Even worse, she was completely right. I was a nobody—not the police, not a PI, nothing. And I’d all but accused a woman of having something to do with her daughter’s death.

  It still didn’t add up for me: the money, the new car, the moving. I hesitated, weighing the pros and cons of disappearing like I should at this moment or pressing just a hint further. If I could find her pressure point and lean on it just a bit—not to make her pain worse, but for Andrea’s sake. To find the person who’d ended her life all too soon.

  With that shred of conviction ho
lding me in place, I pressed just a little bit harder. “I see you have a new car.”

  My words all but stunned Mrs. Ricker. Her hands froze in the middle of toying with her apron and the fabric bunched beneath it. By the time she unfroze, I realized I’d hit a nerve.

  “Why are you leaving, Mrs. Ricker?” I asked softly, aiming for a new approach. “I am truly sorry if I came off accusatory. I don’t think you had anything to do with your daughter’s murder, but I also feel strongly that my boss—my friend—is innocent too. And yesterday, seeing Andrea’s photos at the ceremony...” A very real lump grew in my throat. “It’s not fair that her murderer is going unpunished. I know I’m not the police. I don’t have a license to be here, and you don’t owe me anything. I’m just trying to find out what happened to your daughter.”

  The bit of poison that’d hardened in Mrs. Ricker’s eyes broke. It vanished like a cloud of smoke and disappeared on the next breeze. Her hands unfroze, the apron falling in wrinkles against her lap as she eased onto the edge of the TAKE ME armchair.

  “Mrs. Ricker?” I glanced at the ground, found a patch of clean grass, and rested a knee there. “Are you okay? Did I say something?”

  “We’re fools,” she said. “Fools.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The money. I knew we shouldn’t have touched it, but we didn’t know what to do.”

  “What money? What are you talking about?”

  “There is—was—a trust fund set up in Andrea’s name,” Amaliyah said after a pause. “Last time you were here, I lied to you.”

  “Why did you lie?”

  “Not for the reasons you think.” Tears pooled in Amaliyah’s eyes, and she hugged herself close, looking suddenly thin and tired. “Because I wanted my daughter to love us for...us.”

  I shook my head, not understanding.

  “Ever since she was a young girl, Andrea had been excited by the idea of money. Wealth and fashion and fame and glitz. Nothing we could give her at the time.” Amaliyah didn’t seem to notice as the first tear fell and skidded across her cheek. “The bits about her grandmother—most of that wasn’t a lie. Andrea always did want to be like her grandmother. She told us she wanted to live with her ever since she understood how to talk.”

  “Most people love their grandmothers,” I said, my mind flicking to Dotty Pink. “I loved mine more than anything. She raised me; I didn’t have a mother around.”

  “But Andrea did. I wanted her to love me, to want to be with me, even if she didn’t want to be like me.” Amaliyah shook her head. “But there was no convincing her. My husband and I tried, but no matter what, we couldn’t seem to get Andrea to see our point of view. She insisted on wanting name brand things, items we couldn’t afford, things we just couldn’t buy. We struggled for money, and my mother didn’t offer us anything to help—not that we wanted help.”

  I nodded, listening.

  “We were never enough.” Amaliyah shook her head, lost in her own daydreams. “When my mother passed away, she did leave us money as I told you, but it didn’t come to us, and we didn’t give it away to charity. In fact, I assume the reason my mother didn’t give it to us is because she didn’t want to see money “squandered” to a charity. She didn’t believe in such things.”

  “She put the money in Andrea’s name—a trust that wouldn’t release funds until Andrea turned thirty.”

  Amaliyah nodded miserably. “She found out. The time she visited us, she confronted us about it. I tried to explain—to let her know that we had every intention of letting her take the money freely when she turned thirty—but she didn’t want to hear it.”

  “Why lie to her in the first place?” I asked. “If the money was in Andrea’s name all along, would it really have mattered?”

  “I didn’t want money to be the reason for Andrea to like us—her parents. We are her parents, Lola. She should have loved us for that reason alone and because we loved her back, not because we were the avenue to a large inheritance. If she knew about the money, she would have held on until she got it—and then left.”

  “And in not telling her, you just pushed her away sooner,” I said, puzzling it out as I spoke. “I don’t see—”

  “Of course you don’t see! You don’t have a child. You don’t know what it’s like for them to dislike you because you’re not enough. Because you can’t provide everything they want and desire.”

  I had a fleeting glimpse of my own mother pawning me off to Dotty, and I wondered—hoped, even—that she’d felt some of the same things. It felt easier to me to understand why she’d left me on Dotty’s doorstep this way. The only other alternative was that I just hadn’t been wanted—for no reason at all. And that didn’t feel great.

  “Maybe I don’t know what that’s like, and I can’t imagine the hurt you’re feeling,” I said. “Even if you kept the money from her—why are you spending it now? The Tesla, the move.”

  “What’s left?” She shrugged, helpless. “My daughter is dead. My parents are gone. It’s just my husband and myself now, and for the first time, we have more money than we know what to do with.” She gave a wry smile. “Andrea would’ve loved to see the money used.”

  “I’m really sorry, Mrs. Ricker, and I mean that. I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose a daughter.”

  “No, you can’t,” she said shortly, broken from her reverie. “I lied to you, but only because I was ashamed of the truth. My daughter didn’t love me because I was her mother, and I kept the money from her in hopes that would change. It never did, and when she found out about her trust, things only deteriorated. I haven’t spoken to my daughter in years, Miss Pink, though I never stopped loving her. And I most certainly did not have anything to do with her murder.”

  I nodded, offered another quiet apology, and backed away from her. I still wanted to ask where she was going, what they planned to do, what her husband thought of all this—but I sensed the conversation was over.

  “Thank you,” I said again as she climbed the front steps. “If I find out who was responsible for this, would you like to know?”

  Mrs. Ricker’s face crumpled into weariness, as if my question brought back the reality of it all. A reality she’d temporarily pushed away as she focused on memories from the past.

  Then she looked up, shook her head once. “No,” she said firmly. “It won’t bring her back. Goodbye, Miss Pink.”

  I sincerely hoped this was goodbye. I hoped that she was as innocent as she claimed to be—as innocent as I believed her to be. I hoped that where she and her husband were headed, they could find a peaceful existence. The hole where Andrea had been would always exist.

  I knew this because even though I hadn’t seen my mother in over twenty years, there was a part of me that wondered, that worried, that loved and longed. I only hoped the Rickers could find a happiness like I had. Because even though my life wasn’t traditional, and I hadn’t been raised in a typical home, my life was full. My friends were wonderful, my grandmother had been a beacon of love and hope, and my new employer...

  I hesitated. I hesitated on the word love, on the word employer, and on the word friend. I still hadn’t classified Dane Clark in his entirety, but I had hope. And hope is exactly what I wished for the Rickers.

  Chapter 21

  THE ENTIRE DRIVE, VISIT, and return to and from Glassrock took under an hour, which meant I still had half an hour before I had to be at work. It would be pushing it, but while I had Babs’s car, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to stop home and grab a few of my favorite sunglasses and pay a quick visit to Regina down by the pier.

  Not only would I get my visit with her out of the way, but I wouldn’t have to pack the sunglasses into cases and shove them into my backpack, praying they didn’t break as I pedaled my tush across the Shore.

  Best of all, I could pick up a doughnut at the coffee shop before going to Dane’s. I had a theory he’d instructed Mrs. Dulcet to tone down her baking since I’d been spending more time at the castle, an
d it hadn’t gone unnoticed.

  I stopped home, grabbed an array of styles, and packed them lovingly into the trunk. Then I drove right up to the office where Regina had told me she’d rented space and climbed from the car as I hit speed dial on Dane’s number.

  “Hello?” he answered on the first ring with a hint of worry. “Is everything okay? Lola, where are you?”

  “I’m fine. I’m down by the pier,” I said, breezing past his concern and tucking the warmth of it away to savor for later. “I happened to get up early today and thought I’d run a few errands, but I got carried away. I’m really sorry, but I might be a few minutes late coming to work.”

  Dane hesitated a beat. My stomach sunk. I’d momentarily blanked out how much Dane hated tardiness. His schedule was meticulous, and I’d probably just thrown a wrench in a year’s worth of activities.

  “I’m sorry, it was stupid of me to think I could get everything done in an hour,” I said, easing back onto the driver’s seat of the car. “I’m going to head to the office now—I’ll see you in ten minutes.”

  “What are you doing?”

  I turned his question over for a second. “Right now? Or on my errands, or what?”

  “Does this have anything to do with Andrea?”

  I squinted, my face scrunching as I debated which version of my story to tell. The one where I told the whole truth, or the one where I told him about the fashion show portion and left the rest out.

  “Lola...”

  “Yes,” I said on a sigh. “A little bit. I went to visit Andrea’s parents this morning. After finding out about the trust fund in Andrea’s name yesterday, I wanted to see for myself how the Rickers reacted when I confronted them about it. They lied to me the other day, and I needed to see if they’d admit to the truth.”

  “And?”

  “They’re moving. Mrs. Ricker admitted to getting the trust fund money when Andrea died. I’m still not convinced she had a role in her daughter’s death. Amaliyah seemed genuinely upset about Andrea being gone. I don’t think she would’ve killed her own daughter for a financial payout.”