“I’m more interested in courting clients than other advertising execs.” The second the words were past my lips, I felt my blood run cold. Sure, I felt that way. Sure, I’d said those very words to Carter, Mary Fran, my grandfather, and Andy. But someone connected to the industry?
I groaned inwardly.
Lifting my hands to my cheeks, I, too, pinched my eyes closed for a beat. “Um, can we maybe pretend I didn’t say that?”
I sat, frozen to my seat, as Susan flashed something resembling a smile in my direction before turning back to Mavis. “Myriam is hoping you’ll come by to play tomorrow night after work. She’s missed you these past few days and I-I could use a little…time. Maybe take myself out for a coffee.”
Mavis looked up sharply. “Is there something wrong?”
“I just… I don’t know. I think I just need a little time. To try and figure out what to do.”
“What is there to figure out?” Mavis rasped.
Susan looked off to the side, her face, her aura pained. “I don’t know, Mavis. I just don’t know that I can… I just don’t know.”
If Mavis was listening to the answer she, herself, had sought, it was hard to tell as, once again, her hand tightened around her tissues in a veritable death grip while simultaneously shifting her focus to the front of the room. But when I tried to follow in true Nosey Nellie fashion, Carter and a puffy-eyed Mary Fran stepped in front of my chair.
“Did you see all those pictures?” Mary Fran asked me after nodding politely at Susan and Mavis. “I was a crying mess before we were even halfway through the first board.”
I started to lean around Susan for a tissue but stopped when I felt the weight of Carter’s eyes on the side of my face. Sure enough, when I looked up at him, he was staring at me in that I need to talk to you now way. Only this time, I was sure it had nothing to do with a sudden and inexplicable need to lecture me about my eating habits (thank you, God).
I responded, in kind, with what felt like my is everything okay eyebrow.
Carter raised said eyebrow with an even more intense I need to talk to you now expression and a tap of his wristwatch. “Tobi, I’m sorry, but you asked me to remind you about that stop we still need to make before we head home, remember?”
“Stop? What stop? I didn’t ask you to…” The rest of my sentence faded into the air as the meaning behind Carter’s words hit their mark at about the same time the whole I need to talk to you now thing was morphing into oh good God, are you kidding me, Sunshine?
I cleared my throat, shifted forward in my seat, and stood. “You’re right. I forgot about that stop.” Then, turning to my right, I extended my hand to first Susan and then Mavis. “I’m sorry we had to see each other again under these circumstances but—”
“Can you believe that one faxed in a resume this afternoon?” Mavis mumbled.
Confused, I looked at Susan and, together, we followed Mavis’s eyes to the same tall, model-esque blonde I’d seen at the lunch place earlier that day. Before I could process much of anything, including Susan’s quiet gasp, a flurry of motion pulled me back in time to see Mavis cover her daughter-in-law’s hand with her own and squeeze. “Don’t worry. Hell would have to freeze over before I’d let that happen.”
“Tobi? We really should go.” I felt Carter’s arm slide around mine and lock into place, leaving little to no room for a protest in return.
Still, I managed to fire off a few daggers of irritation in his direction as he guided me toward the front of the room with Mary Fran bringing up the rear. Twice I stopped along the way—once to say hello to Ross Jackson, and once to trade sneers with my former boss, John Beckler, but each time Carter permitted me little more than a minute before the forcible guiding (aka pushing) started again.
The second we hit the lobby though, I yanked my arm away and gave him my best huffy breath. “What on earth has gotten into you, Carter?”
Carter surveyed our surroundings in true Carter-esque style and then lowered his voice to a level that mandated a forward lean from both Mary Fran and me. “Those marks. On his hands. You know what those were, right?”
I looked at Mary Fran to see if she had any idea what he was talking about, but her focus had shifted toward an offshoot hallway. A glance in the same direction yielded a pair of familiar faces just as Carter’s words hit me with the kind of delayed punch that literally stole the breath from my lungs.
~Chapter Twenty~
One of the best things about Carter McDade, besides his loyalty, his humor, and his very being, is the fact that he seemed to know when I needed to process. If we were in my apartment and I needed to process something, he’d nose around my drafting table looking at whatever campaign I was working on at the time. If we were in his apartment and I needed to process, he’d head for his refrigerator and whatever green vegetable called to him in the way Cocoa Puffs called to me. If we were out and about, he’d busy himself with some good old-fashioned people-watching, sans his usual commentary.
In the car, as we were at that moment, he sat in the back seat, seeing how many drivers he could guilt into waving back at him while I worked through his absolute conviction that the marks on Todd Ryan’s hands were rope burns. Mary Fran, however, was an entirely different animal when it came to handling me when I really needed to think. She wanted to talk—wanted to pick apart whatever the problem or issue was until everything was neat and tidy.
She’d done it for months after I caught Nick cheating on me with that waitress from our favorite restaurant. At the time, I’d just wanted to crawl into bed and cover my head while I sobbed. Mary Fran didn’t approve of that tactic and, instead, had set me up on the kind of blind dates that still haunted me on occasion, even now.
The problem was, she was dissecting something completely different than I was, and I was finding it hard to focus. I tried, of course, to tune her out, but every time I started to meet with some success, she’d slap her knee or release a huffy breath, or some other equally distracting response to whatever she was revisiting at that particular moment.
So far, she’d talked about a few of Deidre’s pictures—like the one that had Deidre’s first born wearing the same head cap Sam had worn when he was born…and how the cocker spaniel Deidre had in high school reminded Mary Fran of a cocker spaniel her best friend’s grandmother had when she was growing up, and on and on it went. Those comments had been preceded by nostalgic sighs. When she’d talked her way through pretty much every photo collage in the funeral home, she’d moved on to the people who’d been there and how she could pick out (in under two seconds, mind you) who really knew Deidre and who had been there simply to pay their respects—like us. And, from what I could tell while trying hard to concentrate on the verbal slap Carter had given me, it was during her pontificating about the latter camp that the huffy breath came out in all its huffy breath glory.
“I was pretty sure I’ve seen it all, you know? Restaurants, alleys, hotel lobbies, parking lots, you name it. But at a funeral home? Really?” A second, perhaps even louder huffy breath ended Carter’s waveathon (and thus the limited processing I’d been able to do thus far), in its tracks. “Is there no limit to the lengths a cheater will go to make a fool of his wife?”
Carter flung himself forward between the seats, his attention now firmly inside the car, once again. “Okay, sister, what did I miss? And leave nothing—and I do mean, nothing—out.”
“It was classic. He could barely keep his hands off the bimbo. And she was stirring the pot in true bimbo fashion.” Mary Fran tipped the back of her head against the seat rest. “I swear, it’s why I can’t stand the opposite sex…present company excluded, of course.”
“And Drew,” I reminded while Carter preened in the back seat. “Because things are still good with him, yes?”
Mary Fran waved off the hint of concern I heard in my voice. “It’s still too early to be sure, but he’s
looking to be a mold breaker. Although, even saying that out loud makes me worried about jinxes and all that stuff. Lord knows, it’s happened before, ala Sam’s dad, and then again with husband number two.
“But honestly, when I see this kind of crap going on, I’m really tempted to just declare my celibacy and never leave my house.”
“Rudder would starve,” I pointed out.
“No, you’d feed him.”
My laugh echoed around us as I exited the highway and turned in the direction of home. “While I value your unquestionable faith in me, Mary Fran, this is one area where it might be unfounded.”
“Please.” Mary Fran turned her chin, traded knowing glances with the occupant of my backseat, and then let loose a frustrated groan. “I just want to find the jerk’s wife and tell her to take him for everything he’s worth and don’t look back.”
Fortunately for the traffic light we were now waiting at, the process of teeing my hands didn’t put us in any real jeopardy. I held the tee as I looked at Carter. “Do you know who she’s talking about?”
“No. But the build-up is spectacular, isn’t it?”
“That’s one word for it.” I put my hands back on the steering wheel as I took advantage of the still red light to pin Mary Fran with what I hoped was the visual embodiment of my decreasing patience. “Can you bring me and Carter up to speed without us having to stop at Aunty Annie’s craft store to purchase white fabric?”
“Ooooh, clever retort,” Carter said. “I see what you’re doing there.”
Mary Fran stuck out her tongue, chastised me for not moving despite the now green light, and then shifted in her seat so she was facing us rather than the road. “You were right there, Tobi… I know you saw them there…in that little hallway by the bathrooms there at the end. His hand was on her back and he was whispering something in her ear—something that was apparently so funny she had to giggle in that way all bimbos on the prowl giggle around a man.”
Carter sunk back against his own seat with all the drama of a thespian rather than the guy who does their hair. “I missed it. I was too busy yacking about—”
“Wait.” I maneuvered around a row of parked cars on the right and then stole a glance at my friend. “You’re talking about Kevin Callahan and Lexa Smyth?”
Mary Fran shrugged. “Is this Kevin Callahan guy married?”
“He is.”
“And this Lexa woman? Is she married?”
“No.” I drove through the center of town, past my agency, the deli, the library, and the mini mart, my brain pushing stop once and for all on the processing of Carter’s words in favor of Mary Fran’s. “But trust me, there wasn’t anything there.”
“I know what I saw, Tobi.”
“And normally, I wouldn’t even think of questioning your radar on such matters. It’s almost impeccable.” I shot my palm across the center console lest she try to protest my usage of the word almost, and kept on going. “Lexa works for Kevin. That’s all.”
“How do you explain his hand and her giggle?” Mary Fran challenged.
I slowed at the four way stop and turned left. “His hand was on her back, yes? And he was whispering something to her, yes? I think the back is a pretty innocuous place to put one’s hand while trying to whisper something, don’t you?”
Mary Fran folded her arms in defiance.
I kept going. “Anyway, on top of all that, this unsuspecting wife you assume he has? That would be Susan Callahan—the brunette who I was talking to when you and Carter came up to me at the end. And the woman sitting two chairs to my right? That was Mavis, aka Kevin’s stepmother.”
“I swear, Sunshine, every news channel in town seems to have some variation of the same clip from Saturday night with that poor women sobbing.” Carter stopped just long enough to let loose a dramatic sigh. “You think they’d respect the fact she lost someone dear to her and—”
“See, now I got the distinct impression this evening, that Mavis didn’t really know Deidre. She’s just a nice older woman who is clearly heartbroken at what we all witnessed on Saturday night… At a show hosted and sponsored by her family’s foundation.”
Mary Fran silenced us with a flip of her hand and then narrowed her eyes on my face. “You think cheaters don’t flirt with their mistresses in front of their spouses? C’mon, you’ve seen the chick flicks we’ve watched. That’s part of the thrill for some of these guys.”
“For some, maybe. And mistress? Really? Don’t you think you’re jumping the gun just a little here?”
Mary Fran’s shoulders returned to their upright position as she jutted out her chin. “No. I know what I saw.”
“You saw water cooler chatter without a water cooler. That’s all.”
“And I suppose you’re going to say this Lexa chick isn’t the type to hit on a married man?”
If only I could…
“No. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying Kevin’s wife and stepmom were there—”
“In another room, Tobi.”
I did a rolling stop at the next sign and turned onto the back end of our street. “As I was saying, Susan and Mavis were there, and he has two kids—one of whom is under a year.”
“Sam was under a year when his father strayed.…”
“You’re wrong, Mary Fran.” I peeked up at my house as we drew close, the flicker of blue coming from my windows letting me know my grandfather was still awake. And while I really wanted to just climb in bed and put an end to a day that had been entirely too long already, Grandpa Stu and I needed to talk.
“So what do you think about what I said?” Carter asked as I pulled alongside the curb and shut down the engine. “You know, about the rope burns on the grieving widower’s hands?”
I flashed back to the way Todd Ryan’s right hand had felt inside mine and the image of the angry red lines that traversed his palm as I pulled back and took his left, instead. “I saw them; I just didn’t think much about them.”
“Which makes sense if you ignore the fact that the platform that gave out underneath his wife was suspended by ropes and cables.”
I stared at Carter in the mirror only to turn around and meet his eyes directly. “Do you realize what you’re saying, Carter?”
“Probably the same thing that went through your mind when I mentioned the burns as we were leaving the funeral home.”
“You took me by surprise, sure. And I tried to remember the way his hands looked to see if you’re right but—”
“They were rope burns, Sunshine.”
“Even if you’re right—and I’m not conceding a hundred percent that you are—that doesn’t mean he killed his wife!”
“True. But it might mean Cassie isn’t the only one you need to be looking at for this.” Carter opened his door and stepped out onto the road, a move I matched as if on auto pilot. “Or, if you want to keep your focus on her, turn this possibility with the husband over to Stu. It’ll give him something to do.”
I looked across the roof of my car at Mary Fran, but other than registering the fact she’d exited the car and therefore I could lock it, I didn’t really see her. “Why on earth would Todd Ryan want to kill his wife?”
But even as I asked the question, I knew I really didn’t need either of my friends to answer. Sadly, I’d learned a thing or two about murder over the past six or seven months and while I could never imagine taking a life myself, I knew there were all sorts of reasons that drove others to do just that.
Revenge.
Jealousy.
Greed.
“But he looked so…so distraught,” I muttered as I shut my door and trailed Carter over to the sidewalk and Mary Fran.
“And back in high school, in that show I told you about, he looked like the diabolical wolf.” Mary Fran slipped her arm inside mine and walked with me all the way up to the point where she needed
to veer right to get to her place. “I’m telling you, Tobi. Todd Ryan could’ve had a helluva career out in Hollywood. Oscar winning, actually.”
~Chapter Twenty-One~
There was so much I wanted to say to my grandfather, things I needed to explain, an apology I needed to offer, and theories I wanted to brainstorm, but as was the case when I had a lot on my plate, I was at a temporary loss on where best to start. So, despite the late hour and my eyes being a wee bit droopy, I’d popped some slice-and-bake cookies into the oven, set the timer, and readied the table for what I hoped would be a lengthy and productive powwow.
Granted, when I suggested making the cookies upon my return home ten minutes ago, he’d balked, giving me some song and dance about him being tired and needing to watch his sugar intake before bed. But since Grandpa Stu was the quintessential night owl, I knew his first reason was bogus, and, since he’d invented eleven-o’clock-cookie-time, I knew the second one was as well.
Which is why, once the smell of freshly baking chocolate chip cookies began to make its presence known in my kitchen, I wasn’t the least bit surprised when I heard the telltale sound of his slippers as they left the threadbare fibers my landlord proudly declared a carpet and headed over to my trap (aka my kitchen table).
Without asking, I pulled a pair of glasses from my cabinet, carried them over to the refrigerator, and filled them to the top with milk. When I’d pretty much drained what was left of the gallon I’d picked up the previous day, I set both glasses and a heap of napkins on the table and returned to the oven in time to pull the cookies out in their primo gooey state.
I’d imagine, based on experience, my grandfather sighed at the sight, but considering how loud my own sigh was, I couldn’t be sure. “Oooh, these look good.”
I yanked open the utensil drawer, located my favorite spatula, transferred the half dozen cookies to their waiting plate, and carried them over to my now seated grandfather. “From a purely aesthetic standpoint, Grandma would be pleased, wouldn’t she?”
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