Vindicate

by Beth Yarnall

  “Thank you,” I say, with a twinge of embarrassment. I’m not used to people doing nice things for me.

  “You’re welcome.”

  He slides into his seat behind his desk, which faces mine. It was his idea to set them up like this. He said it was so we could communicate more efficiently. I think it was so he could watch me. That’s what I told myself. I’m ashamed to admit that he’s caught me staring more times than I’ve caught him.

  I pop the lid off my tea. It’s exactly the way I make it—with milk and sugar. Closing my eyes, I wrap my hands around the cup and inhale. I love the way Earl Grey smells. It reminds me of my English grandma, who used to fix Yankee tea minus the tea—hot water, milk, and sugar—for Beau and me when we were kids. She made a pot of Earl Grey everyday for herself and the scent permeated her house. I take a sip and a brief jog back in time to when our family was together and things were normal. Happier times. Much happier times.

  I open my eyes to find Leo watching me.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” He pretends to get busy turning his own laptop on.

  “Hmm.”

  “Did you start on that search?”

  “Yeah, I’m tackling Craigslist first.”

  “I’ll take the PennySaver after I check for updates on the Wheeler family tree on that ancestry website.”

  We’ve already eliminated the obvious listings in newspapers and Internet searches. Someone somewhere stashed this old woman and we just have to find out who and where.

  We work for the next few hours with no luck. A mysterious relative hasn’t suddenly popped up who could be harboring Edith, and the other listing websites were a total bust. I finished up my letter to Beau earlier, so I stick a stamp on it and set it in the outgoing mailbox on Savannah’s credenza. She’s busy clicking away on her computer or else she’s in the running for an acting award, because it’s like I really am invisible.

  Leo comes up behind me and opens the door.

  “Where are you going?” Savannah asks him.

  “Cora and I have an appointment.” He’s using his patient voice, but he’s not very good at it.

  She crosses her arms. “Uh-huh.”

  “Tell my dad we’ll be back in a few hours.”

  “More like five minutes,” she mumbles under her breath.

  I bite my lip to keep from laughing.

  “Excuse me?” he asks her. He had to have heard her.

  “I said you two have fun.”

  He waits until we’re outside to lose it. “When is she going to stop being such a bitch and get over it?”

  “You’re getting off easy, Five-Minute Man. If you did to me what you did to her you wouldn’t be walking so good.”

  He makes a face at my nickname. “She’s never going to get over me breaking things off with her, is she?”

  “She will. When she meets someone else. I put her on the email list of about twenty different dating websites. Hopefully she’ll move on soon.”

  He stares at me across the roof of his car, a slow, wicked smile creeping across his face. “You’re an evil genius.”

  “Only if it works.”

  We climb in the car and he pulls out onto the street toward Horton Plaza, a big downtown shopping mall. We’re meeting Mindy Sumrow at Forever 21, where she worked with Cassandra. I’m hoping she can tell us more about Cassandra’s life during the time she and Beau were broken up. Five years ago she was less than helpful when I tried to talk to her. I try not to count on her being more forthcoming this time around.

  We park in the parking structure attached to the mall and locate the Forever 21 on the mall map. It’s on level one. So are we. As we walk I notice the feminine stares Leo gets and how women continue to blatantly check him out front to back. I know he’s hot—I’m focused, not dead—but I don’t think of him in that context. We’ve developed kind of an asexual friendship of sorts. We’re together all day everyday, we get along well, but I wouldn’t say there is any chemistry between us. One of the chicks we pass lets out a low whistle as she checks him out from behind. I drop back a little to see what all the fuss is about and I get it. I totally get it.

  Leo turns to look at me with a question on his face, probably wondering why I slowed down.

  “You have a nice ass,” I tell him.

  He stumbles over his feet and comes to a halt, staring at me with an odd look on his face.

  I shrug. “I never noticed before.”

  “You were checking out my ass?”

  “Yeah.”

  He looks away, then back. He’s fighting a smile. “And you liked what you saw?”

  “What’s not to like?”

  “What else do you like about me?”

  “You have nice hair.”

  He shoves his hands in the front pockets of his jeans, rocking a little. “Anything else?” He’s enjoying this.

  I lift my shoulders. “You’re pretty easy to look at, overall.”

  He continues to stare at me with that strange expression that if I had to guess was a mixture of joy, confusion, pride, disbelief, and…longing? We’re stopped in the middle of the walkway, forcing people to move around us like water around pebbles in a stream. He takes a step closer to me and I can see that his eyes are brown, but not an ordinary kind of brown. They’re a kind of bronze with a dark brown, almost black, ring around the outside. Funny, I never noticed that before. He eases a little closer and I don’t move, caught in the tractor beam of his gaze.

  He reaches out and captures the first two fingers of my left hand. “You’re pretty easy to look at, overall too.” His voice is a husky whisper that only I can hear. “Very easy.”

  His compliment does strange things to me. I flush, a full-body rush of heat followed by tingling in the palms of my hands and feet and…other places. I can’t feel anything else except his thumb stroking my fingers and the thick, hard thump of my heart.

  Someone bumps my shoulder, pulling my fingers from Leo’s, and the spell is broken. Looking away, I clear my throat and start out again for the Forever 21. Leo follows slowly at first and then quickens his stride to catch up to me. If he says anything right now I might just punch him in the face. Thankfully, he keeps his mouth shut.

  We enter the store and I spot Mindy right away. She’s got the kind of curly hair that explodes out around her pretty square face. She’s the same age as Cassandra would be and I can’t help but feel a twinge of resentment toward her. The old question of why Cassandra and not someone else swirls and I try to not pin too much hope on what Mindy might say and how it could help Beau.

  Leo waits to catch her eye until she’s finished with her customer. She does a double take, then saunters over toward us. Over toward Leo, really. I doubt if she’s noticed me yet.

  “Hi, Mindy?” he says. “I’m Leo and this is Cora.”

  She glances at me for the briefest second. “You didn’t say you’d be bringing her.”

  Great. She’s not going to talk with me here. “I think I’ll go get a smoothie,” I say.

  Leo looks down at me with a crease between his brows. We’d discussed this possibility. It would now be on him to pull what he can from Mindy.

  “I’ll catch up with you later,” he says, running his worried gaze over me.

  I give him a jaunty wave to let him know that it’s okay, even though it’s not. I’m dying to know what Mindy has to say. Glancing back at them as I exit the store, I can tell that Leo already has her wrapped in his charm. Having just been the recipient of that charm, I know how she’s feeling.

  It’s the second time today that I have uncharitable thoughts toward Mindy.

  Chapter 8

  Leo

  Mindy leads me to her office at the back of the store and closes the door. It’s no bigger than a closet. She clears some stuff off a chair so I can sit down. I can hardly concentrate on what she’s saying—something about her office being a mess—let alone what I’m supposed to say. My head is full of Cora. She doesn’t even know
she does it when she twists me up in knots. It’s like she doesn’t even have to try. Just her being her is enough to knock me back a step.

  Like this morning with the tea. It’s the same every time. She takes the lid off, grips it in both hands, closes her eyes, and inhales. I don’t know what she thinks of when she smells that tea, but the look on her face…I can’t breathe. It’s indescribable. All I know is that look has me bringing her tea every morning just to witness it. I discovered what Earl Grey does to her by accident. We stopped at my favorite coffee place one afternoon when I was dragging ass so I could get a double-shot pick-me-up. While we waited Cora opened the tester tins of tea on the shelf behind us and started smelling them. When she came to the Earl Grey she got that look.

  I stood there and watched her, fascinated by her reaction. She held the tin, taking periodic sniffs of it until they called my name, then she reluctantly replaced the lid and put it back on the shelf. That was when I started adding Earl Grey to my morning order.

  And then just now, out there in the mall, when she checked out my ass. Until that moment I was beginning to think that she’d parked me permanently in the friend zone. She liked my ass. And my hair. And the way I looked overall. It took a tremendous amount of restraint not to grab her and kiss her the way I’ve wanted to from practically the first moment I saw her. For the barest of seconds she looked like she might want to be kissed and then some asshole bumped her and she shook it off, becoming determined Cora again.

  I don’t know what I did to suddenly earn her notice, but now that I have it I feel like a junkie looking for his next fix. I want it again. No, I need it again.

  “I don’t know how I can help you,” Mindy says, drawing me back to the here and now. “I told the police everything I know. Besides, I’m not looking to help free Cassandra’s murderer. He can rot in jail forever, for all I care.”

  “I understand that. You want someone to pay for what was done to her.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “But what if it’s the wrong someone? You seem like an honest person, the kind of person who wouldn’t want an innocent man to pay for a crime he didn’t commit. It happens, you know. I work for Nash Security and Investigation. We recently helped to overturn the conviction of a man who sat in prison for thirty-nine years, paying for a crime he didn’t commit. Can you imagine that?” She shakes her head. “Me either. That’s why I’m here. Cassandra’s killer is still out there and we’re trying to find him. Anything you can tell me—no matter how trivial or insignificant—will help.”

  My scare tactic worked. Mindy looks horrified at the possibility that Cassandra’s killer is still out there.

  “I’ll tell you whatever I can.”

  “Thank you.” I gentle my voice. “It must’ve been difficult to lose your friend. Tell me what she was like.”

  Mindy launches into her stories about Cassandra and I add them to the others that Cora told me. The more I learn about Cassandra, the more I like her. Sure, people tend to talk nice about the dead even if they weren’t such nice people, but I have a feeling that Cassandra genuinely was one of the nice ones.

  “Did you ever hang out with Cassandra outside of work?” I ask.

  “A couple times.”

  “Did she mention a new boyfriend?”

  “No, no new boyfriend. She broke up with that Beau a few months before she was…killed, and I don’t know of anyone new.”

  “Did she ever talk about Beau with you? Do you know why they broke up?”

  “Yeah. She talked about him all the time, but I got the feeling there were some real problems toward the end. She cried a lot and then just sort of got into a funk. We didn’t go out after work anymore.”

  “Did she miss any work or have to leave early or come in late?”

  “A couple of times. Hey, that’s right.” She snapped her fingers. “That’s when she first brought up some trouble she’d been having.”

  “What trouble?”

  “She complained a couple of times about some weird stuff happening around her apartment complex—vandalism, things missing—that sort of thing. Nothing sinister. Probably just kids. But I wondered if maybe it wasn’t Beau who was doing it just to get a rise out of her. It was just little things, annoying things. Like as if he was trying to get her attention or something.”

  “Do you know if she ever called the police?”

  “Probably.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I would’ve. A couple of the things she mentioned were just so weird.”

  “Like what?”

  “Someone took her cat, then suddenly he reappeared a couple of days later in a box on her doorstep with a bow around his neck. She was just so happy to have him back I don’t think she thought about someone taking the cat just to mess with her. That’s kind of a sick thing to do, don’t you think?”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t a neighbor returning her cat?”

  “Could’ve been, I suppose, but why not just ring the doorbell? And why the bow?”

  I made a mental note to check to see if Cassandra had filed a police report or if there was any record of her making calls to the police.

  “Can you think of anything else you might not have told the police?”

  “Oh, I told them about the weird stuff.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. They didn’t seem to think as much of it as you do.”

  “Huh. Well, thanks for your time, Mindy.” I gave her one of the blank agency cards that I’d written my name on. “If you think of anything else, give me a call.” I opened the door, needing to get out of that claustrophobic office before the walls really did close in on me.

  Looking down at it, she flicked the card with a finger. “Did your agency really free a wrongfully convicted man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you really think that Beau was wrongfully convicted?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I have to tell you. I met him a couple of times—you know, before they broke up? I couldn’t see him snapping like that and doing what they say happened to her. He loved her. That was as plain as anything. Even after the breakup I don’t think he was the type to hurt anybody, especially Cassandra.”

  I nodded.

  “If I called you, would you let me know what happens? If it wasn’t Beau, I’d like to know who the bastard was who killed her.”

  “Sure. And like I said, if you can think of anything else, let me know. Thanks.”

  I head up to the third floor, where the food court is, and spot Cora right away. Even without the blue hair she would be hard to miss. She’s just sitting there, people-watching. Her look is so far away and lost I wonder what she could be thinking. I’d give my left nut to know what she’s thinking. I don’t know anyone harder to read than Cora. The FBI could do a study on her and train their agents on how to mask their thoughts. I’d hate to play poker with her.

  I approach her from the side and her head immediately swings in my direction. Sliding in the chair opposite her, I notice that she’s been biting her left pinkie nail. That habit is the only outward sign that Cora is as flawed as the rest of us. I want to take her hand and tell her everything will be okay, that I’ll fix what’s wrong for her. But I’m not entirely sure what would happen if I did, so I don’t.

  Cora straightens in her chair and braces her elbows on the table, leaning forward. “Well? What did she say?”

  “She said that weird things had been happening to Cassandra before her murder. Vandalism and things coming up missing, including her cat, which was later returned. Did you know about any of that?”

  She sits back in her chair, contemplating. “No.”

  “Mindy wasn’t sure if Cassandra had called the police or not, but if she did there would be a record, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She didn’t think Cassandra was seeing anyone new and she had some nice things to say about Beau.”

  “You’re surprised?”

  “No. Of course not.”

 
; “Yes, you are.” She comes forward in her seat at me and I can tell I somehow hit a sore spot with her. “Why wouldn’t Mindy or anyone else have anything nice to say about my brother?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way, okay? I guess I was surprised that she didn’t seem to hate him for what she thinks he did to her friend. Most people want to believe the worst in others. Mindy doesn’t when she has a good reason to. That’s all.”

  She eyes me for a moment before settling back in her seat. “Sorry. I’m not really pissed at you.”

  “Who are you pissed at?”

  “Beau.”

  This throws me off guard. Her brother’s so high up on a pedestal for her it’s hard for me to imagine her getting mad at him. “Why?”

  “He refuses to meet with you. Stupid, stubborn jackass.”

  “What if I wrote to him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Couldn’t hurt. We wouldn’t be any worse off than we are now.”

  “I suppose.” She taps her nails on the tabletop…all except the pinkie that she’s chewed down to a nub. “You’d do that?”

  She has to ask? I’d do just about anything for her. “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  “You want a smoothie? My treat.”

  “No, thanks. I want to go to Cassandra’s apartment.” She stands and pushes her chair in, so I do the same. “It’s up for lease again.”

  I’m taken aback by this news. “You keep track of that?”

  “I keep track of a lot of things, but yeah, I set up a Google alert for it. They’re having an open house today. Right now. You can drop me off at my car if you don’t want to go.”

  “No, I’ll go.” I’m curious to know what she thinks she’s going to discover. “How many times have you been there since the murder?”