A Bad Day for Scandal

by Sophie Littlefield

  They checked drawers and shelves and all the obvious places, then turned to less likely spots under pictures and along baseboards and behind electric sockets and in the lining under the upholstered chairs—anywhere a flash drive could be hidden.

  It wasn’t particularly satisfying work. “It’s like she ain’t ever been introduced to a stray thought,” Chrissy said after they’d finished up in the living room.

  “At least she’s got good taste,” Stella said, gloved hands on hips, surveying the expensive interior. The furniture was all fine woods and expensive fabrics and free of even a speck of dust. There were few mementos or pictures, just a couple of silk floral arrangements here and there.

  “Yeah, ’cept for that little display there,” Chrissy said, jerking a thumb at the shelves of a mahogany glass-fronted bookcase that looked like it might be at home in a lawyer’s office. Inside appeared to be every textbook Priss had ever owned, from a series of algebra and history and science books stamped PROSPER HIGH SCHOOL through a dizzying array of economics and finance books. There were also several years’ worth of a magazine called Financial Times, whose editors appeared to have worked hard to present the driest information they could find in as lusterless a fashion as possible while making sure not to waste any extra paper on illustrations or pictures. “That’s just pathetic.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s kind of funny coming from you,” Stella retorted, “seeing as you’ve gone and turned your living room into a geek lab.” Last time Stella visited the little apartment that Chrissy and Tucker shared, around in the back of the China Paradise restaurant, a row of books with titles like Nmap Network Scanning Basics and ASA/PIX/FWSM Firewall Strategies were neatly lined up on top of the pass-through from the miniature kitchen to the tiny living room.

  “Hey, that stuff’s useful,” Chrissy said hotly. “You think Priss really needed to read Finance Econometrics Models to run her little garden business?”

  Her bedroom revealed no clues. Expensive but plain tailored jackets and pants were lined up with military precision in the closet, along with a dozen white blouses. The dresser drawers contained lingerie that had to cost plenty, despite its matronly style. “I wouldn’t wear this to clean house in,” Chrissy exclaimed, holding up a pair of silk hipster briefs between her thumb and forefinger as though they were toxic. “It’s a wonder she got close enough to a man to kill him in these—they’re like man repellent.”

  “First of all,” Stella huffed, noting that the panties didn’t look all that different from some in her own drawers, other than the fact that hers came three to a pack, “not every man wants a woman to be tricked out like a tramp when she takes off her dress. And second, we don’t know if she killed anyone.”

  “Oh. Right. ’Cause it’s just real, real common to pop your trunk to get at your jumper cables and find out, oh damn, somebody stashed a fuckin’ body in there when I wasn’t lookin’.”

  “We don’t presume,” Stella said stiffly. She agreed with Chrissy, but she still had to set an example. Even when the would-be client in question—innocent or otherwise—had complicated her life plenty and pointed her down a path that might well lead to jail. Even then, she had to assume Priss was innocent and act accordingly.

  The thought caused her legs to go a little wobbly, and she sank down on Priss’s expensive custom duvet with its silk cord edging. Dang, she asked herself silently, do I really mean that?

  When she first got into the vengeance business, she didn’t have a clear set of guiding principles. Women arrived on her doorstep with tales of woe and hurt, some of them far worse than anything she’d experienced at Ollie’s hands, and she simply reacted. Partly as a way to continue her own healing, she now understood, she’d seized upon every case with a furious zeal and given everything she had until she was certain the abuser would never hurt anyone again. And though the danger to herself was real, especially in those early days when the layers of fat had yet to be hardened into taut muscle, when she couldn’t tie a restraining knot and didn’t know a slide lock safety from a recoil spring plug, she never hesitated, because going down in flames was a better alternative to living one more day in the victim place where she’d spent most of the last three decades.

  Now, though, she had something to protect. Noelle. Friends she loved. A shot at a future. And still she wasn’t ready to abandon the client who looked as guilty as any she’d had yet, who had already threatened her with ruin and shown every indication she’d follow through.

  Stella had got herself some integrity, it appeared.

  She wasn’t sure she liked it.

  After a moment, she shook off the jelly legs and rejoined Chrissy in the search. The office was more interesting; Chrissy disconnected the laptop and slipped it into Stella’s backpack for further study after determining that the documents folder was locked. Besides the laptop, there were a few Post-its with cryptic notes in Priss’s precise, cramped hand.

  The rest of the apartment didn’t yield much. Chrissy pocketed a tub of face cream—“This is the shit that costs three hundred bucks, I read that in US, Angelina Jolie uses it”—and when they were finished with everything, Stella found herself in the kitchen staring at the pink KitchenAid mixer, which looked like it had never even been turned on, though it coordinated nicely with the traces of salmon in the granite counters.

  “You know,” she said slowly, “Sherilee sure does like to cook.”

  Chrissy glanced at her curiously, then smiled. “Yeah, she does. And I got to say, when you’re fixing French toast for three hungry little kids, that’s a lot a eggs.”

  “Don’t you hate when the recipe says to cream the sugar and butter?” Stella continued, caressing the machine’s shiny, spotless base. “I mean, that takes like ten minutes, just standing there with the bowl.”

  “Tough on the wrists, too,” Chrissy said. “Me, I’d be worried about carpal tunnel.”

  “Well, I guess that decides it, then.”

  While Stella packed up the mixer and hunted down its attachments, still wrapped in plastic in a drawer, Chrissy wiped down a coffee bean grinder and slipped it into her backpack.

  Before they left, Stella took a final tour through the apartment. She felt discouraged. “It’s like there wasn’t a whole person living here,” she explained to Chrissy.

  “Well, you can’t take on that burden,” Chrissy said kindly. “Folks want to live a life of quiet desperation, why, who’re we to stop ’em?”

  “Wow—that’s, um, profound,” Stella said. “You make that up yourself?”

  “Nah. Something I remember from senior year English class. That was Henry David Thoreau, I b’lieve.”

  “No shit. You know, Chrissy, sometimes I think you’re a hell of a lot deeper’n anyone ever gave you credit for.”

  As they slipped out of the house into the eye-stinging cold night, Stella felt a little better.

  She had interesting work. A loyal partner. So she wasn’t getting laid.… Two out of three wasn’t bad.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Oh, I do love me a sausage biscuit,” Chrissy sighed happily as they enjoyed a Burger King breakfast the next morning.

  “Look at you, with that metabolism of yours,” Stella sighed enviously. “I used to be able to eat like that. Now I got to watch it every single day.”

  Her own breakfast, which consisted of orange juice and black coffee and only half a serving of Cheesy Tots, was a concession to vanity. A combination of the hospital stay earlier in the fall, along with a stepped-up exercise routine since she’d picked up some new moves in physical therapy, had helped her drop twenty pounds, and she was now as slender as the day she married Ollie, which was to say, pleasantly rounded. So some of the rounding had shifted a little—so what. That’s what they made all those high-tech supportive garments for.

  “Why, Stella, you’re slim as a whip,” Chrissy said, setting down her biscuit and licking her fingers. “Get any skinnier, and we won’t be able to see you when you turn sideways.”
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  “I don’t care how thin I am, I just want to be healthy,” Stella lied modestly.

  “And you’re looking mighty fine, now you finally got Noelle on you to take care of your upkeep. It’s refreshing, is what it is, seeing you take a little trouble in the morning.”

  Stella snorted, but she was secretly pleased. It was true—she’d let Noelle teach her a few makeup tricks; they had all these new products that really went a long way toward covering up what wanted covered, and highlighting her assets. Noelle had brought her a soft pink eye shadow that made her green eyes sparkle brightly, and taught her how to apply eyeliner so it looked almost natural and stayed mostly where it was supposed to. She’d introduced Stella to a variety of concealers—creamy ones for the dark spots under her eyes, mineral powders that covered up redness. And there was this new plumping lip gloss that was practically magic, giving her a va-voom bedroom pout with just a few swipes.

  She’d been noticing a general uptick in the sidelong glances and outright admiring stares she received from gentlemen in recent months, and while part of her figured it owed to her new pantherlike figure and updated makeup, another part of her suspected it was simply a matter of the energy she was putting out into the universe.

  That bit of wisdom came courtesy of an article in Cosmo that she read while she was waiting to get a filling replaced at the dentist a few weeks ago. In the article, a relationship expert laid it all out like this: When you put out confidence, a kind of a couldn’t-care-less-what-anyone-thinks vibe, it messed with men’s basic woman-noticing habits. Their fragile internal compasses, the same ones that generally pointed steadfastly toward anything with big bosoms and mile-long legs, got sent spinning when they suddenly confronted a woman who didn’t have any plans to worship them just for giving her the time of day.

  They’d done this study where they coached women to go into a party and repeat certain phrases in their heads. One bunch of gals was directed to repeat over and over in their minds “I’m the smartest, most attractive woman here, and I don’t need a man to be complete,” while the other group was directed to compare themselves to every other woman in the room in terms of looks and cleverness and sex appeal. Well, it wasn’t much of a surprise that the first group got themselves showered with fellows asking for dates and phone numbers, while the second group ended up standing around alone at the punch bowl.

  It wasn’t this article that got Stella to rethink her place in the world of singles. In fact, looking back, she wasn’t quite sure she could pinpoint what it was. Part of it, to be sure, was her side business taking off and growing to the point where she often had more clients than she could manage: she simply didn’t have time to worry about how other folks viewed her as she went through her day. And part of it was surviving a near-fatal encounter with a murderous branch of the Kansas City mob. That certainly taught her not to sweat the small stuff.

  And a final part was, undoubtedly, the comfort of having Noelle back in her life, along with all the other people who constituted her extended family. For the first time in many years, Stella rarely felt lonely.

  So, yes, Stella felt basically content with herself, with her body and her looks and her opportunities for professional fulfillment. She’d gotten almost Zen-like—she didn’t actually know a whole lot about Zen or Buddha or anything like that, but from what she understood, they were the serenity experts—in her long view, and if life just rolled along the way it had been, with its challenges and rewards, she could be content for the rest of her days.

  Except for one thing.

  One heart-skipping, mind-messing, breath-catching thing.

  Every time she saw Goat Jones, her little pillar of serenity crumbled like a house of cards, leaving her feeling as uncertain and vulnerable as a newborn baby fawn. And every time their relationship took even the tiniest step forward—when he brought her flowers in the hospital, when he took her for a trip out on Lake of the Ozarks in his canoe, when he kissed her at a barbecue a few months ago—she found that she was spending more and more of her waking hours mooning over him, and more of her nighttime hours dreaming blush-inducing scenarios in which he featured most prominently.

  And since he’d kissed her the other night—the hottest kiss yet—she found that thoughts of Goat intruded on nearly every minute of the day.

  And that was no good. Not when they had incriminating evidence to hunt down and possible killers to evade.

  “Chrissy,” Stella said briskly, crumpling up wrappers and paper cups and collecting them on the tray, “thanks for all the encouragement and kind words, but it won’t much matter what I look like unless we get the job done. Unless I figure out where them pictures of me and Ferg went to, they’re liable to end up in the wrong hands.”

  “You mean the sheriff’s hands?”

  Stella grimaced. “That’d look nice, wouldn’t it—I guess then he’d have no choice but to haul me in as a suspect, seein’ as I’d have a heck of a good reason to be out to get Priss, and my fingerprints over at the last known place she was visiting at. Motive and opportunity, I believe it’s called.”

  “Yeah, I guess then you’d fry for sure,” Chrissy said glumly, “seein’ as they already run your prints and all a couple of times in the past. You’d be in a three-strikes situation.”

  There was that. Stella didn’t remember being printed when they came for Ollie—didn’t remember much about that day at all, other than staring down at his no-good carcass on her kitchen floor and wondering how he got there. But she did remember when Goat had covered for her after the altercation that nearly left her and Chrissy dead, when their prints had been identified on a number of weapons—luckily, they’d been ruled weapons of self-defense.

  Of course, she hadn’t been convicted in either of those situations. Still, there was only so far a person could hope to push the police, even in a sleepy town like Prosper, even in a mostly rural county like Sawyer.

  “Well, dwelling on it ain’t gonna help anything. Let’s go figure out what the heck the judge was wanting so bad, she sent them guys after it.”

  Halfway over to Marilu Carstairs’s place, Chrissy asked a question that had occurred to Stella, too. “Wonder what would of happened if them two clowns had found the drive first.”

  “Well, we don’t know if it was the same drive,” Stella said.

  “Well, duh, I know that. They’ve got so cheap, if I was Priss, I would have had a separate one for all my, uh, subjects.”

  “If Priss is in the blackmail business, there’s no telling how many of those she’s got.”

  “That wouldn’t be a bad business,” Chrissy said. “You probably wouldn’t need to have the dirt on all that many people to make the rent every month. Just sayin’.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Stella sighed.

  The looming front gates of the judge’s development came into view. Stella thought it looked more like a Vegas good-times ranch than a condo complex, with its gold lettering on the signs and fancy fountains and columns everywhere, but she had to admit that the place was kept spruced up nice. Expensive cars sat in driveways, snow was shoveled with ruthless precision from the walks, and ice crystals sparkled on the spindly trees tied up to stakes lining the streets. Evidently the landscaping hadn’t had time to get going yet.

  The condos were grouped in twos and threes, the buildings separated from each other with tall fences, which did detract some from the cozy neighborly effect.

  “There—there it is,” Chrissy hissed as though someone might hear, pointing at a duplex at the far end of the first turn in the road. “Drive on past.”

  “Thank you, junior sleuth. I wouldn’t of thought of that. Fact, I was gonna just pull right up in the drive and holler at her to come on out.”

  “No need to get nasty about it,” Chrissy complained. “’Sides, there wouldn’t be room for you.”

  Sure enough, a car had pulled into the driveway ahead of them, a newish Camry. The driver didn’t get out right away; it looked like a man,
and he was doing something to his hair, looking at himself in the rearview mirror.

  Stella cruised slowly to a cluster of mailboxes centered on three guest parking spots, and pulled in and cut the engine. They watched the man in the car, but he kept at his grooming or whatever it was he was doing. He was too far away to make out any features.

  “How long you figure he’s gonna keep us waiting?” Chrissy said. “Fuck this, let’s go.”

  “Go where?” Stella demanded in alarm.

  “Go do what we come for.”

  Stella had no choice but to follow Chrissy as she grabbed the backpack from the backseat and got out of the car. At least the girl walked in the opposite direction from the condo in question, looking for all the world like she was out for a casual stroll.

  “We can go around the back,” she muttered when Stella caught up with her. They slipped around the next building, winding around past a little duck pond and a gazebo, and tracked back until they were looking at the fence at the back of the judge’s unit.

  “Now what, you gonna catapult me over that?” Stella demanded. She couldn’t see a thing over the top except for the judge’s second-floor windows, which were shaded by thick draperies.

  “It’s tempting,” Chrissy said, and then she flattened herself against the fence and started inching along toward the front yard. “Cain’t nobody see us from over there, though.”

  They crept to the front, where the fence took a sharp corner and ended in a gate leading around the side of the building. This was familiar from the aerial views they’d seen online. Bushy hedges on the other side of the fence shielded the path from the wall—if they could get there. For the moment, they ducked behind a tall shrub and peered out at the visitor’s car.

  The man was parked no more than ten feet away, but he appeared to be absorbed with looking at his lap.

  “What do you think he’s doing?” Stella demanded, mystified.

  “Texting, no doubt.”