And Death Goes to . . .

by Laura Bradford

  “None of which you’ll know if you don’t go inside, dummy.”

  A laugh from somewhere over my left shoulder caught me off guard and I turned to find a guy, about my age, staring at me. I couldn’t quite make out his face thanks to the shadow cast by the interior light streaming onto the sidewalk, but I was pretty sure he was grinning.

  “I said that out loud, didn’t I?”

  “Yep.”

  I looked up, found the trio of stars I’d had to follow every night for a month when I was in third grade, and deflated my cheeks with what could only qualify as a pretty impressive exhale. “I do that sometimes.”

  “I know. I do it sometimes, too.”

  I lowered my gaze so I could try to make out more of his features, but since the light was still in play and neither of us had moved, it was futile. “Thanks.”

  “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” he asked. “Assuming, of course, you listen to yourself and go inside.”

  “Thanks, but I’m meeting someone.”

  “Another blind date?” he asked.

  Even now, with Andy in my life, I still shudder whenever I hear those two words, thanks, no doubt, to Mary Fran. In fact, all those stories people think when they hear the words, blind date were tame compared to the ones Mary Fran arranged for me.

  I shuddered again.

  “And you’re still playing along?”

  I shuddered a third time. “Uh, no. Been there, done that, never going back.”

  “Does Mary Fran know this?”

  I startled so hard and so fast I had to steady myself against the window with my hand. “Y-you know…Mary Fran?”

  He stepped forward, out of the direct path of light streaming through the window, and smiled. “Don’t you remember me? Mary Fran set us up last summer. I’m—”

  “Oh my God, you’re…” I swallowed back foot-fetish guy and, instead, made myself insert what I hoped was his real name. “B-Brian, right?”

  “Brent,” he corrected as the smile slipped from his face. “Brent Dalton.”

  “Of course. Brent. I’m sorry. I-I knew that, I just…” Again, I let my words trail off for a moment, only this time I remained silent rather than add yet another lie to my day’s total.

  He waited me out for a few seconds and then, when I didn’t finish, he turned and made his way back across the street, sans coffee.

  I considered calling out to him, but when I really thought about it (and the fact that it was because of him, I’d sworn off blind dates forever), I simply turned, headed inside, ordered a cup of hot chocolate, and carried it over to Susan Callahan’s table.

  “Oh, hey, Susan…right?” I mentally patted myself on the back for remembering some of the acting tips Carter had shared over the past few years and followed it up with a smile for the woman now looking at me with a mixture of confusion and…apprehension?

  I set my hot chocolate mug on her table and extended my right hand. “I’m Tobi. Tobi Tobias. I met you last night at Deidre Ryan’s viewing. I was in the back, talking to your mother-in-law.”

  It had taken a moment or two, but based on the hint of familiarity making its way past the confusion, I was pretty sure I was ringing some bells.

  “Oh. Sure. Yeah.”

  I pointed at the empty chair across from hers and, at her eventual nod, sat down. “I love this place.”

  “I thought we’d have come sooner but…” Susan’s voice, along with her eye contact, faded off for a few seconds before returning with a shake of her head. “I decided to come myself.” She gestured around the room. “I take it you’re here alone, too?”

  “I am.”

  She ran her finger along the top of her mug for a few moments and then looked up at me. “You’re okay with that?”

  “Okay with what?”

  “Doing stuff like this”—she pulled her finger back long enough to gesture around the room a second time—“like being at a place like this by yourself?”

  “Sure.” I took a sip of my hot chocolate, moaned a little over how good it tasted, and set it back down between us. “I love to do things with my friends. They make me laugh, you know? But sometimes, it’s just nice to be alone—to think, to plan, to dream…”

  Susan laughed, although there was no humor in the sound. “I’m not sure I even know what it is to dream anymore. I thought I was living mine so I…stopped, and…” Something that sounded like a strangled sob made its way past her lips before she dropped her head into her hands. “I wanted to be a good mom. I wanted to be a role model. But, now, because of him, I’m not any of those things.”

  Now, I realize I’m not always the epitome of decorum, but I’m usually pretty smart in the basic rules of life. I know when to use my magic words (my mom was big on instilling those), I get the whole different strokes for different folks thing (my sister is a hippie), and I’ve gotten where I am in the business world by knowing when to listen and when to talk (thank you, Grandpa).

  So, long story short, even I was surprised when I decided to confront her with what she’d done…in the middle of a coffeehouse…without my grandfather or Carter or Andy for backup. “You switched the names, didn’t you?”

  For a minute, I wasn’t sure she heard me on account of the fact her head remained down and I heard nothing even resembling a sound from her general vicinity. But just as I was revving up to say it a little louder, she lifted her head, her eyes seeking mine as tears escaped down her cheeks.

  “I didn’t know that was going to happen,” she whispered as the tears came faster. “I-I swear I didn’t.”

  “But you changed the name in the envelope.”

  Her gaze lifted above my head, but I didn’t bother to turn around. I knew she was no longer in Perk-It! Instead, if I were a gambler, I’d bet my agency and my car on the fact she was back at the banquet hall, watching as the platform gave way beneath Deidre. “I couldn’t let Lexa’s name be called. I couldn’t watch my daughter clap her little hands for the woman her daddy has been sleeping with for months. I-I just couldn’t let that happen.”

  “So you’re saying Lexa was supposed to win?”

  Susan’s focus returned to the room and to me. “Mavis said you were in the field, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “So surely you know.”

  “Know?” I echoed.

  “That Lexa Smyth is sleeping with my husband. Everyone knows that.”

  I grabbed my hot chocolate and took a big gulp. “I don’t pay attention to that stuff… Benefit of working for myself instead of one of the big agencies, you know?”

  She stared at me for a minute. But just as I was trying to decide whether the expression she wore was one of pity (for my being out of the loop) or shock (I was leaning toward pity), the tears started again. “I see the looks every time I walk into the office or the foundation. All these people who used to smile when I came in with Kevin, now avert their eyes like they’re afraid to look at me. And the ones who actually speak to me? They’re no doubt whispering about me and my kids when we leave. They all assume I’m the clueless wife, and they pity me and my children. But I’ve known about Kevin and that little tramp for a while.”

  “How?”

  “He butt-dialed me about a month ago. I heard…everything. Every word, every groan, every…noise.”

  I willed away the image of walking in on Nick and the waitress from our favorite restaurant and, instead, reached across the table and patted Susan’s hand. “I’m so sorry. He doesn’t deserve you.”

  “On some level, I know that. But then, when I look at my kids and think of uprooting them from their home and trying to raise them alone back in the northeast, I find myself wondering if Mavis is right…if it’ll stop like she says it will.”

  “Once a cheat, always a cheat.”

  “You really believe that?” Susan asked, pulling her hand out
from under mine.

  “There’s a reason we’ve all heard that expression.”

  Silence sat alongside us for a few moments as I tried to figure out what to do. Did I call the cops? Did I encourage Susan to turn herself in? I really wasn’t sure.

  And that’s when it hit me. Susan assumed I knew about her husband. Which meant her motive for killing Deidre didn’t work.

  Before I could get my bearings though, Susan spoke again, her voice hushed and raspy. “I keep thinking about Deidre’s kids. They looked so lost last night…because their momma was their world just like she should’ve been… But then, I think of mine, and how lost they’ll be if I go to jail for what I did. But Tobi? If I’d known that platform was going to give the way it did, I’d have let my daughter clap for her daddy’s mistress.”

  ~Chapter Twenty-Six~

  My grandfather was sitting on the couch, watching television, when I raced into my house some thirty minutes later, my head reeling from the about-face brought on by Susan’s parting words.

  I’d been right. Lexa had been the intended winner in my category on Saturday night. Her name had been in one of the same sparkly gold-edged envelopes used for all the winners since the award show’s debut some forty-one years earlier.

  But just before the show started, Susan swapped the envelope with one containing Deidre’s name under the guise of changing her baby. Then, she returned to her seat beside her husband, waiting for the moment Deidre—rather than Lexa—was called onto the stage as the night’s big winner. Only instead of getting to enjoy the chance to lash out at her husband, she’d watched a woman who was not her husband’s mistress fall to her death…from a platform that had, ironically, already been sabotaged.

  I tossed my keys onto the little table next to my door, watched them go flying off the other side, and kept right on walking until I was standing in front of Grandpa Stu. “Lexa was the target, not Deidre.”

  He shut off the TV. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m positive.” I ran into the kitchen for my Cocoa Puffs and popped the lid open as I returned to the living room and the vacant spot on the sofa cushion next to Grandpa Stu. “I talked to Susan tonight.”

  His mouth gaped, closed, and then gaped again. But not a sound came out.

  “I know, I know. I should have told you where I was going. But I thought maybe she’d be more open if I approached her alone—as someone who’d just met her the previous night.”

  “Go on.”

  So I did. I told him everything, my eyes widening right along with his as I rehashed the evening in a way that made him feel as if he, too, had been there. When I got to the last thing she said to me (or, perhaps, the last thing I remember her saying to me), I stopped, mid-crunch, and splayed my hands out from the sides of the box. “Changing the envelope to make Deidre the winner was Susan’s way of striking out at Lexa. But the real strike was already in place.”

  “For Lexa.”

  I nodded so hard I almost fell off the couch. “Exactly. So while I think the whole anger thing is still very much in play, we’ve been sniffing around the wrong places because we had the wrong victim.”

  “So Todd and his rope burns are out, like I suspected.”

  “Yup.”

  “And Cassie is back in play.”

  I paused my hand inside the box and mulled my grandfather’s words. Still, as much sense as they were starting to make, I needed to play it out. “Are you asking that because of what she said on the phone earlier?”

  He nodded. “There’s no love lost between her and Lexa, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “She had access to backstage, correct?”

  “Correct, but—” I stopped, unsure of what, exactly, was bothering me.

  “But what?”

  “What you described…about how the stagehand said the platform was sabotaged… That had to take a little time, right?”

  “Some, I guess. Ropes like that would take time to cut, and even the loosening of the bolts wouldn’t be fast.”

  “And let’s not forget, Cassie was in a gown with a slit. I’m thinking that wouldn’t be easy to maneuver around in for something like you just described.”

  “The last safety check was at five o’clock, Sugar Lump. The show started at eight.”

  Crap.

  I’d forgotten that part.

  I shoveled up a handful of puffs, popped them into my mouth, and waited for the sound of my own crunching to clear my head. It was one of my odder quirks, but one I’d come to embrace as one of my truths over the past half year or so.

  “You look tired.”

  I glanced up from my box and swallowed my chewed puffs. “I am. It’s been a long day.”

  “Then get some sleep. This will all still be here in the morning.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but none of what I said made any sense thanks to the yawn that took over mid-way through the first word. A second, even bigger yawn let me know my grandfather was right. If I continued pushing, I’d end up making no sense and I’d be useless at work the next day.

  “Okay, okay, you’re right.” I closed the lid on my puff box, and leaned over to my grandfather for my good night hug. “Thanks for listening, Grandpa.”

  “My pleasure, Sugar Lump.”

  I pressed my head into his chest and savored the feel of his arms around my shoulders and the warmth of his kiss on the top of my head. I wished, as I did every night he was here, that I could be little again if for no other reason than to relive every moment we’d spent together. But we couldn’t, and I knew this. All we had was now. “We need to talk, Grandpa Stu. Before you leave. There are some things I need to say.”

  “You love me, right?”

  “More than all the stars in the sky.”

  “Then that’s all I need to know.”

  “Grandpa, I—”

  “Not tonight, Sugar Lump. You need your sleep.”

  * * * *

  I slept the sleep of the dead. Which, translated, meant I slept through my alarm, was forced to skip my morning round of Cocoa Puffs, and drove a wee bit faster than I should have in order to find myself standing in front of a clearly amused JoAnna roughly two hours late.

  “They say there’s a first for everything and you seem hell bent on proving that true this week, don’t you?”

  “Meaning?”

  “You rebuked candy yesterday, and you-who-is-never-ever-late-for-work is, well, late for work.”

  I considered rolling my eyes, but JoAnna was right. So, I pulled the lid off her candy jar, asked permission to dive in, and, when I had it, pilfered a butterscotch candy and a fun size bag of M&Ms. “I slept hard that’s all. Did I miss anything important?”

  “No.”

  “No calls?”

  “No.”

  “No appointments?”

  “You had one, but I rescheduled the moment Stu called and told me you were still asleep.”

  “My grandfather called?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Just that you were asleep and he didn’t have the heart to wake you.”

  I unwrapped the butterscotch candy and slipped it in my mouth. “He wasn’t anywhere to be found when I woke up.”

  “He said he had an errand to run and to tell you he’d be in touch soon.”

  “That’s all he said? No specifics?”

  “You know Stu.”

  “If he calls, patch him through. If he shows up, send him back.” I replaced the lid, tossed my wrapper into the trash next to JoAnna’s desk, and headed down to my office and the concept ads I needed to work on for the upcoming zoo room at Pizza Adventure.

  It was hard to concentrate thanks to the way my mind kept playing over Susan’s words, but I stuck with it until I had a few workable ideas in draft form tha
t I could show Dom and Gina at our next scheduled meeting. It had been slow going, no doubt, but I was pleased with the result, if not myself, for the whole sleeping-in debacle.

  “Tobi?”

  Stretching my arms high above my head, I spun around on my swivel stool and stood. “Yes, JoAnna?”

  “Mary Fran is on line two.”

  “Line two. Got it.” I started toward my desk but stopped shy of my destination to call out to JoAnna as she headed back down the hall. “Any word from my grandfather yet?”

  “No.”

  Hmmm…

  I walked around my desk, flopped onto my chair, and grabbed my desk phone, pressing line two as I did. “Hey, Mary Fran.”

  “Did Sam tell you about that Callahan creep?”

  “If by Callahan creep you mean Kevin…yes.”

  “He was so upset last night he almost didn’t want to go back today.”

  “Sam has another day off?”

  “Technically, no, but since yesterday was a teacher in-service day and he wasn’t missing anything because of that, I agreed to let him take today off when he got the call. Though now, after yesterday, I’m pretty sure he’s wishing he hadn’t taken the job at all.” Mary Fran’s voice dipped with what was likely an adjustment of the phone between her cheek and her shoulder as she moved about the pet shop doing any one of the dozens of tasks she did at about this same time every day. “Which doesn’t help this irresistible urge I have to go down to that agency and rip this guy’s eyes out.”

  I yanked open my secret stash drawer, fished out a box of Milk Duds, and popped a few into my mouth. “Prob…ably…not…a…goo-d…idea.”

  “Are you chewing?”

  “Yup.”

  Mary Fran said something to someone in the background and then continued with me as if I hadn’t just gotten busted eating and talking at the same time. “Sam said he wasn’t sure what was worse…wondering if the wife knew or knowing that the grandmother did.”