And Death Goes to . . .

by Laura Bradford

  “C-could you drop me off at-at the v-vet on your way to w-work?” Rapple asked, between sniffles.

  “I thought they were going to call you at eight.” I reached around to the outer side pocket of my backpack and consulted my phone for the time. “You still have another fifteen minutes until then.”

  Ms. Rapple pulled out another tissue, dabbed at her eyes, wiped the line of snot from her nose, and added it to the growing pile at my feet. “I need to see her, Tobi. I need her to know I’m still here. That I’ll be by her side no matter what happens.”

  And then, before I could find even so much as a word to say, she burst into the kind of tears that tore at my heart. “I-I c-can’t l-lose her, T-tobi. She’s my o-only r-real friend. The one who sees past the p-prickles.”

  Prickles?

  Did Rapple just admit she was prickly?

  I was still trying to wrap my head around what I was hearing when the woman’s voice dropped to a near whisper. “I-I’m n-not a likeable p-person, T-tobi. Y-you know that. C-carter knows that. Mary Fran and Sam know that. Even your Andy knows that. The o-only per-person who d-didn’t, was S-stu.”

  The tears continued, only now they weren’t just Rapple’s.

  Stealing my hand back, I reached into her tissue box, dabbed at my own cheeks, and with a shrug I’d need to examine later, threw it into the pile with Rapple’s. “I…I…like you…Ms. Rapple.”

  I diverted my eyes from my neighbor just long enough to peek at the second floor window behind me. A lack of movement in the area of Carter’s blinds let me know my secret was safe.

  “No you don’t.”

  I turned back to Rapple. “Um…yes…I…do.”

  Her free hand found her hip and, in a flash, I heard Carter’s voice in my head.

  “Incoming! Incoming! Hit the deck!”

  She raised her hip hold with a glare when I laughed. But just as I was gearing up for the biting comment that was sure to follow, the woman’s whole body deflated like a pricked balloon. “I don’t know what happened. One minute everything was great and the next, he shut me out.”

  “I don’t think Gertie is shutting you out, Ms. Rapple. She’s just not feeling well, that’s all—”

  The sniffles were back. So, too, were the tissues.

  “I’m not talking about Gertie. I’m talking about Stu.”

  I wanted to cover my ears and beg her to refrain from talking about my grandfather, but thanks to JoAnna, I couldn’t.

  Even without the pile of tissues at my feet and scattered around my plants, I could tell Rapple was miserable. I saw it in her re-puffed eyes. I heard it in the sniffle/hiccup combination that had been nearly constant since I stepped outside. And I felt it in my chest every time a fresh round of tears re-started the combination.

  It was a misery that was achingly familiar even though my grandfather’s rendition was slightly different. With him, the eyes were droopy—lacking any desire for contact, and showing no signs of their normal mischievous spark. With him, there was no sniffle/hiccup combination. Instead there was almost complete silence. And while the feeling in my chest in response to his misery was far more acute, there was no denying the underlying truth.

  Rapple was heartbroken without my grandfather.

  And, like it or not, Grandpa Stu was showing some signs of being heartbroken without Rapple.

  It wasn’t what I wanted. Not by a long shot. But if I’d learned anything in my almost thirty years of existence, it was that things didn’t always go as I hoped. When it didn’t, it always stunk in the immediate. But eventually, in most of those cases, the happenstance I’d thought was akin to the demise of the world ended up being not so bad. Or, in some cases, way, way better.

  Like when Nick broke my heart by fooling around with that waitress. At the time, I thought my world was caving in. But now, with Andy in my life, I realized that one horrific moment may have been one of the best things that ever happened to me.

  I shook the odd correlation from my head and forced myself to focus on the still sniffling woman standing no more than two feet in front of me. “Ever since I was a little girl, my grandfather has always told me to take things one step at a time. He says it’s less overwhelming that way. And from what I’ve seen so far, he’s right. So we’re going to take his advice now and focus on Gertie, first. We’re going to find out how she’s doing and what they’ve found, and deal with that. Then, when you have those answers, you can try to figure out this thing between you and”—I hooked my thumb over my shoulder, in the direction of the house—“him, okay?”

  ~Chapter Fifteen~

  I was halfway through the donut I’d snuck out of the vet’s office when JoAnna breezed into my office, her eyes wide with an apology she didn’t need to make yet I knew was coming anyway.

  “Oh, Tobi, I’m so sorry. The dentist got to talking and the next thing I knew it was nine-thirty.”

  “The search party was scheduled for nine-thirty-one so you’re fine.” I held out what was left of my breakfast and offered to break it in half. Thankfully, the offer was shaken off. But in doing so, I couldn’t miss the fact that her worry hadn’t abated. At. All. “JoAnna, please. You told me yesterday that you might be late this morning, so I wasn’t surprised. And…news flash… I’m capable of answering the phone if it rings, you know. Which, by the way, it didn’t.”

  JoAnna’s stance softened a smidge. “No calls yet?”

  “Nope. Although there was one voicemail that came in on my cell while I was turning on the lights.”

  “And?”

  “It was just Carter. Wanting to tell me about a-a hallucination he apparently had.”

  “What kind of hallucination?”

  I broke off a scrap of my donut and rolled it between my thumb and index finger. “He, um, said he thought he overheard me out on our front yard…um…telling Rapple that I…like her.”

  “Ha!”

  I stopped rolling. “So no harm no foul if I don’t call him back and correct him?”

  “Correct him about what?”

  I looked down at the flattened donut morsel between my fingers, shrugged, and popped it into my mouth. “It doesn’t matter. So how’d the dentist go? Any issues?”

  “None, thank heavens.” JoAnna backed into the chair across from mine and flopped down, the expression on her face quickly transitioning from worry, to surprise, to disdain. “Since when do you pick a donut that looks like that?”

  I noted the lift to both her left nostril and her left eyebrow and then followed the aforementioned disdain to my right hand. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “There’s not so much as a shred of chocolate on it anywhere, unless you licked it off already.”

  “I don’t lick off chocolate!”

  Her nostril relaxed enough to allow her right eyebrow to join her left.

  “Okay, so I lick sometimes…sue me.” I looked down at the remaining bite or two in my hand and then tossed it onto my calendar book. “You’re right. It’s a lousy donut.”

  “I can tell that from here. What I can’t tell is why you ordered it in the first place.”

  “I didn’t order it. I hijacked it.” I pushed my chair back from my desk and began foraging through my drawers. I passed over the lifesavers, briefly considered the pretzels, and finally settled on a tiny handful of M&Ms. “The staff at Gertie’s vet apparently doesn’t do chocolate for breakfast. Or, if they do, they plowed through them before we got there.”

  “Why were you at Gertie’s vet?”

  “Because Rapple asked if I’d take her out there this morning.” I arranged my M&Ms by color across my palm and systematically ate my way through the piles until I had one of each color left. “So I took her.”

  When JoAnna said nothing, I looked up to find her watching me with a mixture of amusement and I’m not sure what else. “What? Don’t you dar
e tell me you don’t do the same thing when you eat M&Ms. Everyone does. I’m pretty sure it’s wired into our brains from birth.”

  “I don’t do that.”

  “Liar.” I extended my palm across the top of my desk. “What’s your order?”

  “My order?” JoAnna asked.

  “When you have one of each left—green, blue, orange, red, brown, and yellow—what order do you eat them in? Favorite to least favorite, or least favorite to favorite?”

  “How is Gertie? Any improvement?”

  I considered calling her on her diversionary tactic, but in the interest of getting my chocolate fix, I gave up and popped the orange (I’m a least favorite to favorite gal, myself) into my mouth. “They’re waiting on a lab of some sort. So I told Rapple to call me once she knows.”

  “That was very nice of you.”

  “If you saw her this morning, you’d understand.” I ate the brown, the green, and the blue before contemplating the red and yellow and opting for the red. “So, I have a theory I’d like to run by you if I may.”

  She held up her finger in the universal wait sign, did a quick yet surprisingly thorough job of organizing the minor mess I’d managed to create across the top of my desk in the thirty minutes I’d been there, and then lowered her hand back to her lap. “Okay, I’m listening.”

  “You can’t help yourself, can you?” I ate the yellow and then stood, my thoughts immediately traveling back to the previous night. “I still need to figure out the why, but I think Cassie Turner had something to do with what happened to Deidre.”

  “Why on earth would you say that?” JoAnna asked.

  “Because the envelope was wrong, for starters, and—”

  “Envelope?”

  I returned to my desk, woke up my sleeping computer, searched images for the St. Louis Advertising Awards, and, when I found the same handful Sam had shown me the night before, gestured for JoAnna to come around to my side.

  When she was in position just over my left shoulder, I pointed at the envelope in each pertinent image. “See? They’re always edged in the same sparkly gold glitter stuff, and written on in the same gold sparkly ink.”

  “It’s a nice touch.”

  “Some of these pictures go back”—I clicked on one that looked older—“years. And while the clothing styles worn by the presenters and the winners have changed over time, that detail hasn’t. It’s part of the tradition—like the Golden Briefcase and the Golden Storyboard.”

  “Okay…”

  “Even on Saturday night, the envelopes for all of the categories leading up to mine were the way they’ve always been. Gold sparkly edges. Gold sparkly writing.”

  When I was sure she’d seen enough of what I wanted her to see, I minimized the screen and turned my attention to the packet of pictures I’d secured in my backpack before Sam headed home the previous night. I extracted the pictures I’d hung on to and held them out to JoAnna.

  “Are these from Saturday night?” she asked as she took them from my hand and smiled down at the top one in the pile. “Oh, Tobi, these are wonderful.”

  “Sam took them, of course.”

  “This one looks so happy, doesn’t he?” She tilted the stack downward so I could see the winner of the Best Fifteen Second Spot award from my seat.

  “He does. But look at the envelope.”

  JoAnna resituated the pile to give herself a better view. “Okay, I see it.”

  “See the edges? The writing?”

  “Sure, it’s like the ones you just showed me on the computer.”

  “Exactly!” I pointed at the pile, and, at her nod, liberated it back from her hands so I could shuffle through the shots to get to the one I wanted her to see. When I found the one of Cassie walking out to the podium, I handed it back. “Now, look at the envelope Cassie is carrying out.”

  Again, JoAnna did as I asked. Only this time, as she brought the picture close, her brows furrowed. “There’s no gold, no sparkle. It’s just…plain.”

  “Exhibit A.”

  JoAnna studied the picture a bit more and then moved it to the bottom of the pile in favor of the next one—this one depicting the moment Deidre’s name was called and Sam (who’d had his camera trained on my face) swung his lens over to her table. The mixture of shock and joy on Deidre’s face sagged JoAnna’s shoulders. “It’s still just so awful.”

  “Look at the next one.”

  Again, JoAnna shifted the top picture to the bottom. This time, the image was of Deidre beside the podium, accepting the Golden Storyboard and envelope from Cassie. “Okay…”

  “See? Same plain envelope.”

  “That’s what she carried out, Tobi.”

  “I know that. But why?”

  “Maybe they ran out of envelopes and misplaced the pen?” I felt my eyebrow lift, only to have JoAnna wave it back to its normal starting spot. “Scratch that. That’s dumb.”

  I pointed to the pile of pictures. “Now look at the next one—or maybe it’s the one after that.”

  JoAnna moved two ahead and then tilted it back in my direction for confirmation she was on the right one. At my nod, she pulled the picture close. “What am I looking at now?”

  “The screen behind Deidre.”

  “Okay, I see it now. It’s proof they started to play the wrong ad. This one is for the Metro Link spot, not the library as it should have been.”

  I steepled my index fingers under my chin. “Exhibit B.”

  “I still think the tech crew just made a mistake.”

  “A valid theory if not for the sudden change in envelope.” When it became apparent JoAnna wasn’t following my line of thinking, I returned to my feet and the window where I often did my best thinking. “I think there’s a chance the tech crew had it right.”

  “You mean you think the Metro Link ad was the actual winner.”

  I turned, perched my backside on the windowsill, and settled my hands on their opposing upper arm. “I think Lexa was supposed to win that award, not Deidre.”

  “I don’t know why you think that. Your ad was much better than hers,” JoAnna protested like the loyal employee and friend she was. “So, too, was Deidre’s.”

  “While it would be lovely to imagine a world where merit is what’s rewarded, that’s not always the case. Sometimes it’s other things if you get my drift.”

  “I don’t. So explain.”

  “Theresa Kinney.”

  JoAnna drew back. “Theresa Kinney? Why on earth are you bringing that one up?”

  “Why did she win Best Overall that first year?” I countered.

  “Because she was sleeping with her boss—her married boss, I might add.” JoAnna huffed out a breath and then moved around my office neatening papers, picture frames, my umbrella stand, and basically anything and everything she could get her hands on. “The things some women do to get ahead in this world is absolutely mind bog—” She stopped and looked at me. “Wait. Is Lexa Smyth like that?”

  “She has that reputation, yes.”

  “But—”

  “The word on the street is that when she was with Ross Jackson, she had a corner office…after only two months.”

  “Okay…”

  “And Cassie had the corner office last year when she won.”

  “But Lexa isn’t with Ross Jackson, anymore. She’s with Callahan now, isn’t she?”

  “She is, but Ross is still a sponsor of the award show. And who knows what Lexa might have going on with one of the judges—who, as you know, represent all of the big agencies, not just Callahan folks.”

  “Okay, that makes sense.” JoAnna gave up on her latest round of cleaning (mostly because everything was clean) and joined me over in the vicinity of the window. “And that’s why you think Lexa was supposed to win? Because of the manner in which she climbs to the top?”


  “I think she was supposed to win because it was her ad that was starting to play when all hell broke loose.”

  “And you think Cassie made her own envelope before she came out?”

  “I do.”

  “But if there’s anything to what you’re saying, don’t you think Cassie would have wanted Lexa dead, not Deidre?”

  “On the surface, yes. But I think there’s way more at play here.”

  “Like what?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer JoAnna’s question just yet. Right now, I was just operating on a gut feeling that had reared its head in the wee hours of the morning—a gut feeling I needed to explore a little more before I gave it a voice. Still, I didn’t want to blow JoAnna off so I grabbed hold of a different bone.

  “Deidre Ryan was Bitch Pitch.”

  JoAnna’s inhale echoed across my office. “Noooo…”

  “That’s what I said when Ben told me. But I think he’s right. And I think what happened to her could be tied to that somehow. Or”—I shrugged—“I could be reaching for nothing.”

  Either way, there was no denying there was some hinkyness going on.

  The plain envelope was hinky.

  The fact that Lexa’s ad had started to play as Deidre stepped onto the platform with her award in hand was also hinky.

  But the hinkys didn’t add up. Not in any way that made any sense. Which meant I still had a lot of work to do to get to a point where I could even begin to figure things out.

  “I need to talk to Cassie.” I pushed off the windowsill and made my way back to my desk. “I’d also like to see that list you made of Deidre’s campaigns.”

  JoAnna pointed to a folder on the left hand side of my desk—a folder I hadn’t noticed until that moment. “It’s all there. And it’s quite a list.”

  I grabbed hold of the folder and sank back onto my chair. “And this includes the work she did before she had her kids?”

  “It sure does.” JoAnna pivoted on her sensible shoes and started toward the hallway. At the door, she stopped and looked back at me. “If you need anything else, you know where to find me.”