Crazy, Stupid, Dead

by Wendy Delaney

  “Remember what I said about my mother’s contractor arriving when I was there today?”

  He sharpened his gaze. “What about it?”

  “It was Gary Carpp, some muckety-muck with the company that built her house. I guess there’s been an ongoing issue with some cracks that need to be fixed.”

  Steve shrugged a shoulder. “Okay.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “From some interactions with him?” Like an arrest?

  “If you want to call a county council meeting an interaction. But I mainly know him from coaching one of his kids a couple of years back.”

  “That’s it?” I asked, inching closer to study his face.

  He smirked. “You can look as long as you’d like. I got nothing else for you.”

  “Really? That’s all you’ve got?”

  “What exactly were you hoping for?”

  “I don’t know. There’s just something about him that’s a little creepy.” And that was before I realized that he was the tree guy.

  Steve extended his arm in invitation, and I nestled next to him on the sectional. “Is your mother concerned about having this guy in her house or something?”

  “No. I think I was the only one of the two of us who thought something felt a little off.”

  “Probably because you were looking for trouble.”

  “At my mother’s?” I rested my head on his shoulder. “Hardly.”

  “Chow Mein, you’re always looking for trouble.” Steve leaned back and pulled me on top of him. “And I do believe you just found some.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  AFTER I COMPLETED all the paperwork for my seven-thirty appointment with Dr. Carpp, I figured that I might as well take advantage of the empty waiting room and see what I could find out from Tessa, his receptionist.

  I was acquainted with Tessa from having gone to high school with her husband, Colby. So after we got caught up with how she and Colby had adjusted to life with twin girls, I mentioned how I had been with Rox when I cracked my filling.

  “Roxanne was quick to recommend Dr. Carpp,” I said, leaning on the white counter separating us.

  Tessa smiled. “We always appreciate patient recommendations.”

  “Oh, she wasn’t the only one. Robin Kranick also told me to come here.” Or might have if the subject had ever come up.

  “Robin Kranick?” Tessa offered up a blank look. “That name doesn’t sound familiar.”

  “Really? She made it sound like her mother had been a longtime patient. I’m sure you remember her. Naomi Easley?”

  “Oh, I remember Naomi. She and her husband came to my wedding. But she was never a patient.” Tessa chuckled. “Not that we mind people patronizing the competition. If they didn’t, this waiting room would be standing room only.”

  Okay. Good to know that the “house call” that Althea witnessed didn’t take place because of some doctor/patient relationship.

  “Still, it was really helpful to hear such glowing reviews. It’s been a while since I’ve had a checkup, so I’m a little nervous about it.” Especially since Althea’s dentist and his brother the “tree guy” were two of the last people to see Naomi alive.

  “Charmaine, you’re gonna love how gentle Greg is. Everyone does.”

  Tessa’s biased endorsement didn’t make me any less nervous, and by the time Samantha, the dental assistant, fastened a baby blue paper bib under my chin, my heart was thumping like a kettledrum.

  “Relax,” she said, patting my arm after she finished taking a set of X rays. “The doctor will only be doing an exam today, so you’ll hardly feel a thing.”

  Since Naomi had probably been so out of it that she didn’t feel much the night she drowned, I didn’t find that very reassuring.

  “Breathe,” I told myself, trying to slow my pulse while I stared at a watercolor in blues and greens. No doubt the tranquil seascape had been chosen to give the patient something calming to focus on in an otherwise austere environment.

  This patient’s pulse, however, refused to be calmed and hammered in my ear as if I’d been swimming laps in that seascape. Unfortunately, despite the cool air circulating the office, I was also sweating so I blotted my face with my paper bib.

  That’s when a taller, grayer version of Gary Carpp in a white lab coat walked up next to my chair.

  “Charmaine?” he asked, offering a bright smile while he extended his hand.

  Crap.

  “Hi.” I smoothed the bib over my chest and shook his hand.

  “Greg Carpp. I understand you’ve got a sensitive tooth.”

  “I bit down on something hard and it hasn’t been the same since.”

  “I like to think of that as nature’s way of reminding people that they should make an appointment to see their dentist.” He winked. “But I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way.”

  I forced a smile and gave my upper lip another swipe when he turned to look at the computer monitor at the desk to my right.

  “I see it’s been a couple of years since your last checkup,” Dr. Carpp said.

  “You know how it is when you move and have to find new doctors.”

  He nodded at my feeble response while flipping the screen to study my X rays.

  I needed to say something to grab his attention. “Fortunately, I was visiting Althea Flanders and she was telling me about you. Actually, you and your brother.”

  Dr. Carpp turned, focusing on me over the wire-frame reading glasses he had put on. “What’s this now?”

  “I guess you and your brother were visiting the lady who lived across the street, Naomi Easley,” I said, watching him carefully for a reaction.

  The pleasant expression slipped from his face like butter off a stack of pancakes. “Hunh.”

  “You made an impression.” And the one you’re making right now tells me you’re not happy about it.

  “Naomi was a nice lady. It’s a shame what happened.”

  He didn’t look that broken up about it to me. “A real shame.”

  Seemingly eager to change the subject, Dr. Carpp swiveled over in his chair while Samantha blinded me with the overhead light. “Let’s take a look and see what’s going on, shall we?” he said, adjusting the dental chair back so quickly that it felt like a warning about who here would be making that discovery.

  While I knew I was in no serious danger as long as I could see Samantha standing over my left shoulder, that didn’t prevent fresh beads of sweat from oozing from my every pore.

  Within seconds, Samantha reached behind her to direct a portable fan at me, and then whispered in my ear, “I get hot flashes too.”

  Even though she had just aged me a few years, I appreciated having an ally in the room, especially while one of my prime suspects was pointing a sharp instrument at me.

  “Relax and open wide,” he told me.

  Relax. Sure. That could happen.

  I sunk my nails into the vinyl armrests. Please don’t hurt me.

  I spent the next few minutes trying to remember to breathe while the man poked around in my mouth. By the time Samantha freed me from the confines of my blue bib, the only pain I felt was when Dr. Carpp informed me that I’d need to come back to have not just the one cracked filling replaced, but I needed a new filling to address the cavity that had developed on the tooth next to it.

  “How much will that cost?” I asked Tessa after I made my way back to the front desk.

  “With your insurance plan, probably a little over a hundred dollars.” She brightened. “We have an opening tomorrow afternoon if you’d like to get this taken care of.”

  With a looming car repair bill poised to wipe out my savings, I had no desire to go further in the red. “I can live with this for a little while.” Plus, until I ruled out the Carpp brothers as suspects, I didn’t want to give one of them permission to come at me with a drill. “After I check my calendar, I’l
l call to schedule an appointment.” Maybe.

  “No problem.” Tessa propped her elbows on her desk. “So, what’d you think of Greg?”

  I thought he was hiding something.

  Did that make him a murderer? No.

  But there was something about how his demeanor changed when I mentioned Naomi’s name that gave me the willies.

  “You were right. He was very gentle.” With me, anyway.

  * * *

  After confirming with Georgie that he’d have my car ready for me when I got off work, I caught up with the filing, and then settled in at my desk for the rest of the morning to run background checks for one of the paralegals in the criminal division.

  As long as I was searching for criminal history, I typed in Greg and Gary Carpp’s names. Neither brother had much of a checkered past. Gary, a resident of Port Townsend, had a misdemeanor battery charge that got dropped after the guy he punched failed to appear, and some traffic citations from over twenty years ago, while Greg the dentist received a speeding ticket from the state patrol last year.

  Big deal.

  The much more interesting information came from the Cascara Development Group website. There, while boasting about the luxurious homes they had constructed in the greater Seattle area, the privately held parent of Cascara Construction portrayed itself as being family oriented by featuring the ownership group on a biography page.

  I zoomed in on a picture that the caption identified as company founder and president John Carpp alongside his wife, Margaret, and smiling sons Gary and Greg back when they were in their twenties.

  While the image conveyed home and hearth, it also projected the spirit behind the heading at the top of the page: Let our family build your family’s dream home.

  “Is that why you were there with your brother, Greg?” I asked the future dentist staring back at me. As a representative of your family’s business?

  It was the only thing that made sense. Especially since their visit to Naomi Easley’s condo fit in the same timeframe as when Byron’s family was approached.

  That didn’t mean they would have had motivation to harm Mrs. Easley if they failed to persuade her to sell her house. Then again, if she had been the lone holdout on that block, millions of dollars of potential profit could be very motivating.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “CHARMAINE DIGBY TO see Mrs. Ferris,” I told the same uniformed security guard who had stopped me in front of Marietta’s gated community yesterday.

  The middle-aged man with the beer belly hanging over his belt gave me a long look before thumbing through the pages on his clipboard. “You’re not on the list.”

  Give me a big break. “You remember me from around this time yesterday, right?”

  He nodded politely. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And I was on the list then, right?”

  “You sure were.”

  “Okay, then will you buzz me in, please?”

  “Sorry, you’re not on today’s list.”

  Did this guy think he was guarding Fort Knox or something? “Then please call Mrs. Ferris so that she can tell you it’s okay to let her daughter in.”

  “I really am sorry, but I’m not allowed to call her before noon.”

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to abide by Marietta’s “Do not disturb” notices. “Give me a minute,” I told him while I called her cell phone number.

  “Charmaine,” she said, picking up after one ring. “What a nice surprise.”

  “Didn’t Gram tell you I was coming over?”

  “Uh, she may have mentioned it.”

  “Well, I’m at the front gate and …” I squinted at the name embroidered on the security guard’s khaki shirt. “You failed to pass that information along to Hank so I’m not on the list.”

  Marietta uttered a less than genteel curse word. “May I speak with him, please?”

  I handed Hank my phone, heard him offer his assurances that this inconvenience wouldn’t happen again, and then he said much the same thing when he handed me back my phone.

  But I wasn’t as interested in being elevated to VIP status as I was in locating the current Cascara Construction job site. So after I hung up with Marietta, I asked for directions.

  Hank promptly scurried over to his guard shack to open the wrought iron gate and returned with a visitor’s map. “Thinking of buying?” he asked after circling the tract of approximately twenty hillside homes at the outer rim of the subdivision that would complete construction at Bayview Estates.

  And live even closer to my mother? I forced a smile. “Just taking a gander at the location for my neighbor.”

  Giving him a wave, I eased through the open gate before it closed on me, and then snaked past two dozen million-dollar homes until I reached the highest point on the bluff, where I spotted a construction trailer on wheels.

  I slowed, checking out the vehicles parked in front of two of the houses being framed. The beater van parked behind a faded blue pickup didn’t have any trees on the side panels, and the other four cars were not new enough to double as company vehicles, so I pulled up in front of the construction trailer and climbed out of Gram’s SUV.

  Since I had been short on time this morning, I hadn’t done much with my hair or makeup, and my yoga pants and pink cotton tunic probably made me look like I had taken a wrong turn for an exercise class. But with several heads swiveling as I stepped on a wooden plank that provided a path across one of the muddy lots, I hoped that might work to my advantage.

  “Is Mike here?” I asked the scruffy twenty-year-old with the hammer looking down at me from a ladder.

  “Mike,” he shouted. “You got company.”

  Within seconds, Mike Pollard glowered at me from the second story. “What do you want?”

  I shielded my eyes from the glare reflecting off of the puffy white cloud above him. “A minute of your time.”

  When a guy who looked like a young version of Gary Carpp appeared over his shoulder, Mike pointed at the aluminum trailer behind me. “Over there.”

  Going back the way I had come, I waited by the steps of the trailer as instructed and watched two men pounding nails up on the second story. Neither resembled a Carpp.

  I didn’t see any other movement up there, but I wouldn’t be able to tell if there was anyone working at the rear of the house without crossing the street for a better vantage point. And with the scowl hanging from Mike’s brow as he climbed down a ladder, I knew this was not the time to do anything besides plant my feet.

  I pasted what I hoped was a pleasant smile on my face while Mike glided across the wooden plank with surprising grace for a big man. But there was nothing the least bit graceful with how he stomped past me up the steps without an acknowledgment of my presence.

  “Come on,” he said, holding the door of the trailer open for me.

  I felt tremors as if the earth were shifting under my feet as I stepped around a metal desk layered with building plans. “Sorry to pull you away from your work.”

  Mike closed the door and took a seat at the desk. “Never mind that. What are you here for?”

  I inched closer so that I could see him better in the dim light that four little windows provided the cramped workspace. “I wanted to ask if you’ve had any trouble from Gary or Greg Carpp.”

  Mike gave me a long look. “Trouble like what?”

  “Like anything beyond ordinary work stuff.”

  “I wouldn’t call it trouble.”

  I needed him to keep talking. “What exactly?”

  “Gary can be a hothead. You find out fast to stay on his good side.”

  “Or what?”

  “He can get in your face.”

  “Like confrontational?”

  Removing his ball cap, Mike raked his fingers through his short, dark hair. “I guess.”

  “Have you ever heard about him getting physical with anyone?” I asked, thinking about the battery charge that
had earned Gary a court date.

  Mike’s mouth formed a straight line while he stared at his well-worn running shoes. “Nope.”

  That looked more like a yes to me. “Okay. Have you ever heard Gary threaten anybody?

  “If this is about Ryan—”

  “It’s not. Not directly, anyway.” I inched a little closer. “How about it? Did Gary ever make it sound like he was going to hurt someone?”

  Giving me a smirk of contempt, Mike pushed out of the chair. “I need to get back to work, and you need to leave.”

  I clasped his forearm, touching solid muscle. “What about Greg?”

  “I don’t deal with him. Gary’s the only one I have to answer to.” Mike opened the door. “And I’d like to keep my job.”

  I turned to him after he followed me down the steps. “Mike, I have a friend who might be getting pressured to sell to these guys.” It was a little late to use Naomi Easley this way, but with this mountain of a man ready to kick me off his job site, it was the only play I had left. “Should she be concerned about what they might do?”

  He shot me a dismissive glance. “They care too much about their professional reputation.”

  Okay, then I needed to stop imagining a Carpp brother pushing Naomi Easley’s head below the surface of that water.

  “At least I used to think they cared,” he muttered as he walked away.

  Dang. Mike might as well have lit a match under my imagination.

  * * *

  “Where have you been?” my mother asked, waiting for me at her front door wearing a tiger-striped tunic and black yoga pants like mine, only two sizes smaller. And I was pretty sure that she hadn’t found hers at Valu-Mart.

  I gave her a quick hug. “I stopped to talk to a guy I met a couple of days ago.”

  Her glossy lips curled into a knowing smile. “Does Steve have some competition in the neighborhood?”

  “No, nothing like that. This guy’s just someone I met through work.” But I wasn’t here to talk about the men in my life.

  “I have to be back at the office in a half hour, so I need to make this fast,” I said, heading to the table where we had lunch yesterday.