by Kylie Logan
“Don’t need to think about it.” She grinned. “I’m smart.”
“And the man?”
“The man,” she said, “he had a beard.”
A man with a beard. Here at Pacifique the night of the murder.
This was exactly the kind of break in the case we’d been waiting for, and anxious to give Tony Russo a call, I took my parsley plants out to the car. By then, Minnie was nowhere to be seen, so I turned toward the house. I was almost there when I heard a curious noise from inside, like something heavy falling over.
Or something being thrown.
Before I could decide which it was, I heard Sophie’s high-pitched scream and broke into a run.
She was somewhere upstairs, and she screamed again just as I burst through the kitchen door.
“I’m here, Sophie,” I called, and took the steps two at a time. “I’m coming!”
I dashed into Rocky’s neat little library and found no one. I looked into the room filled with botanical prints and it was empty.
Sophie was in the guest bedroom, lying facedown on the floor, and I raced over to her and knelt down at her side.
In the great scheme of things, I guess I should have looked around the room first.
The blow hit me from behind even before I knew it was happening, and in an instant, stars burst behind my eyes. Novas exploded inside my head.
And then everything went black.
Chapter 16
The first thing I saw when I woke up was a straw hat. It was a little crooked.
Or maybe it just looked a little crooked because the room was spinning in front of my eyes.
Then again, the expression on the face of the woman wearing it was a little off-kilter, too. Like she wasn’t quite sure what to do.
“Minnie?” A wave of nausea nearly took my breath away. I was on my back, and I tried to prop myself up on my elbows and promptly fell back on the floor. “Minnie, what are you doing here? What happened? And where’s—”
A memory like the cold slap of a tsunami washed over me, and inside my muddled head, I pictured Sophie as I’d seen her when I walked into the room.
Facedown and on the floor.
“Sophie!” Nausea be damned! I sat up as quickly as I could, ignored the scene in front of me when it tipped right then left then right again, and scanned the room. Sophie wasn’t where I’d seen her last, and at the same time as my heart skipped a beat, I looked over my shoulder.
She was sitting up on the edge of the bed, one leg propped on the mattress. Her face was ashen.
“What . . .” I tried to stay upright, but it was a losing cause from the start. Before I could flump down like a dead fish, I lowered myself back on the floor. “What happened?” I asked her.
There were two spots of high color in Sophie’s cheeks, but—thank goodness—I saw no sign of injury, no sign of blood. She pressed a hand to her heart. “I walked into the room and someone . . .” When she shivered, I felt the tremor of fear all the way over where I lay. “Someone was in here. Behind the door.” She looked that way and swallowed hard. “That person . . . he . . . she . . . he pushed me down and I landed . . .” She put a hand to her knee and winced.
Well, that explained the screaming.
“I fell over on my face and just kept screaming, and I don’t know what would have happened if you didn’t get here. But you did.” Her shoulders lost some of their stiffness. “I heard you say you were on your way and I heard you come into the room, Laurel, and then I heard a sort of sickening thud and . . .” She pressed her fingers over her lips.
“Did you see who did it?” I asked her.
Her lips puckered and her gaze traveled over to where Minnie knelt at my side, and automatically, I found myself scooting over on my butt, putting a pathetically few safe inches between me and Minnie.
Sophie made a face. “I can’t say for sure, of course. I don’t know for sure. I was too afraid to look,” she admitted. “And I was in too much pain to move. I waited until I heard the person run out of the room and down the steps and out the front door. Then I dragged myself over to where you lay and the next thing I knew, Minnie was here.”
Minnie nodded like a bobblehead, and I had to put a hand on her arm to stop her before all that movement got the better of my stomach.
“Minnie, how did you—”
“Told you I was smart,” she said. “I heard the screaming. In the garden. I was picking lavender.” Like a fairy godmother brandishing her magic wand, she waved those lavender stems in front of me, and the scent that had been so clean and pleasant outside stuck inside my nostrils, cloying and sickening.
My own hand shaking, I pushed the lavender away.
“What did you see?” I asked Minnie. “Who did you see? When you came back into the house, who was here, Minnie?”
Her lips folded in on themselves. “Nobody,” Minnie said. “But someone out there.”
She pointed to the window in the guest room. “Someone running toward the road.”
Not someone who’d parked anywhere where we might have seen the car.
I grumbled a curse at the same time I tried again to drag myself up off the floor. Before I could, we heard cars pull up the drive and a second later, running footsteps inside the house.
“What happened?” Tony Russo asked almost before he burst into the room. “Who’s hurt? What happened? Who did it?”
I passed a hand over my eyes and while I was at it, I managed to scoot back so that I could sit up and lean against the bed. A simple enough movement, but it took a lot out of me and I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, Tony was peering into my face.
“The paramedics are coming,” he said.
By way of telling him what I thought of this idea, I made a move to push him back. It was a noble effort. Really. Too bad I passed out before I knew if anyone was going to pay any attention to it.
• • •
I WASN’T IN Rocky’s guest room.
I knew that the moment I next woke up and saw the color of the wall over on my left. No more creamy white, soothing ivory, gentle shades of ecru. No more pooling draperies or light filtering through windows that looked out over the gardens.
The wall was green and there were metal blinds on two windows with a view of a blacktopped parking lot. When I turned my head (oh so carefully), I saw that the tile on the floor was green, too.
Hospital room.
I groaned and when that didn’t change anything, I added an especially colorful curse.
“Nice way to talk!”
I hadn’t realized Tony Russo was in the chair next to my bed until he spoke, but believe me, I didn’t waste any time on being embarrassed. Or on taking back the words I’d muttered.
“What am I doing here?” I asked him, struggling to sit up. “I don’t belong here. I’m fine.”
“The paramedics said otherwise.” He didn’t look especially upset by my outburst, just a little amused when he handed me the gizmo that made the head of the bed rise. The curtain was pulled around my bed, enclosing the two of us in a world bordered by that green wall, the windows, and a whole lot of white fabric. “They’re keeping you for observation.”
I did as quick a mental computation of the days as my scrambled brain could manage. It was still light outside, still Friday. I didn’t have to leave town until early Monday morning for my interview with the senator.
I couldn’t be gracious about the hospital stay, but I could be cooperative. At least to a point.
I raised the head of the bed and settled back against the squishy pillow. “Have you figured out what happened?”
“I was about to ask you that.” When Tony shifted in the guest chair, the green vinyl cushions creaked. “What did you see?”
I thought about shaking my head and decided that was probably a bad idea. “Not a thing. I walked
into the room and the next thing I knew, wham!”
“Could you have been struck by Minnie Greenway?”
I had to admit, the thought had crossed my mind back at Pacifique when I found Minnie bent over me. “But why?” I asked Tony and myself. “There doesn’t seem to be much point in her leaving me out in the garden and going into the house so she could attack Sophie and then me. And she seemed better, didn’t she?” I thought back to my brief visit with Minnie. “She said she’s been taking her medication and she seemed more . . . I don’t know . . . more together.”
His head didn’t feel as if there were elephants in it doing the conga, so Tony was able to nod without wincing. “Pretty much what I was thinking. And she is the one who called us. Why attack you and Sophie, then call us to come help you? That’s just . . .”
We both knew he was going to say crazy and there didn’t seem much point in belaboring the subject.
“So if not Minnie,” Tony asked, “who?”
“Somebody who was already in the house when Sophie went inside.” This was a new thought and it just sort of fell out of my mouth at the same time it popped into my head, but I guess I had an excuse, what with my brain feeling like Jell-O. “Whoever it was, that person didn’t want Sophie to see him . . . or her. My guess is the person thought she . . . or he . . . or whatever . . . that the person thought he could lay low until Sophie and I left, but then Sophie went upstairs. So when she walked into the guest room, where the intruder was hiding, that person shoved her down and probably would have left the house right then and there if I didn’t come running. Once I was there—”
“You were a threat. Younger than Sophie, more likely to fight back and get a look at your assailant. Conking you on the head was the logical thing to do. Hey,” he protested as soon as I shot him a look. “I didn’t say it was right, or good. I just said it was logical from your attacker’s point of view. It was better than some of the alternatives, that’s for sure.”
Some of the alternatives were things I didn’t want to think about.
I shivered and pulled the lightweight hospital blanket up around my shoulders. It was the first I registered that I was wearing one of those flimsy blue and white hospital gowns that tie in the back and pretty much don’t cover anything that should be covered. I tugged the blanket up a little farther.
“So the real question . . .” I thought it through. “Who was it in the house? And what was the person doing there?”
“My guess is he was looking for something,” Tony said.
“Like he was the night he broke into the house, the night Rocky made note of on her calendar.”
“Could be.” He rose to leave. “In the meantime, if you think of anything, if you remember that you saw someone or noticed something odd, you’ll call me, won’t you?”
I promised I would, only before Tony could lift one edge of the bed curtain so he could scoot around it, I stopped him.
“But what about Sophie?” I asked.
Tony smiled and whipped back the curtain to reveal that I was in a two-person room. My roomie was Sophie.
Relief washed through me. That is, until I saw that her leg was encased in some kind of contraption designed to keep it immobile.
“How are you feeling?” I asked her.
She smiled and waved good-bye when Tony walked out of the room, but the moment he was gone, she harrumphed. “Stupid,” she said.
“You can’t think—”
“That I could have done something?” Sophie clutched her hands together on top of the cotton blanket that matched mine. “I should have. I could have at least taken a look and seen who did it.”
I wasn’t about to argue that point with her. Whether she realized it yet or not, I was convinced that the fact that she kept her head down and her face averted was what kept her from further harm. There was no telling what our attacker might have done if Sophie could identify him.
“It doesn’t matter now,” I told Sophie, both to soothe her and because it was true. “All that matters is that you’re okay. How’s the knee?”
She winced, so that told me something.
“You called George?”
She nodded. “Talked to Inez, too. They’ve got everything under control tonight, and Declan and his family, they’re coming in to help.”
My protest hadn’t even made it to my lips when Sophie stopped me. “This has nothing to do with you. Declan heard what happened, that’s all. My guess is by now, everyone in Hubbard knows the story. He heard what happened and he knew since it’s Friday we’re going to be slammed tonight. So he said he’d come over and help out, you know, with cashing out customers and such. And he said his mom and dad don’t mind helping, either, and there are a few nieces and nephews who can bus tables and a couple of cousins who might be able to pitch in.”
I suppose I should have been grateful, and deep down inside, I guess I was.
Except I couldn’t help but picture the Fury family turning the Terminal upside down. Maurice Chevalier would be replaced by the Chieftains and every tartine would come with a side of colcannon.
And I couldn’t worry about any of it.
Not from a hospital bed.
“Misti says she can be there early tomorrow to help with the breakfast crowd,” Sophie said.
“I hope we’re out of here by tomorrow,” I grumbled.
Sophie sniffled. “You could have been really hurt.”
“It’s just a headache.”
“But if something happened, Laurel, because you were coming to help me . . .”
If I could have reached across the space that separated our beds, I would have patted her hand. Instead, all I could do was try to talk her down. “Something didn’t happen. At least not something too horrible. But what was the person doing there in the house?”
“I heard what you said to Officer Russo. It was the killer. It had to be. And he had to be searching for something.”
Hey, three cheers for my brain. At a time when it was hard to think of pretty much anything at all, it managed to nudge a memory out of me.
“The stuff we found in Rocky’s safe deposit box,” I said.
“But he couldn’t have known we had it,” Sophie insisted.
“No, he couldn’t have. For all the killer knew, all that stuff was still in the house. He didn’t know about the safe deposit box.” It’s funny how the mind works, or maybe the fact that mine had been recently jumbled actually helped. A distant memory bubbled up to the surface.
Rocky’s date book and the notation of the break-in.
“You don’t still have those papers from the bank with you, do you?” I asked Sophie.
She nodded and reached into the top drawer of the bedside table for her purse. “Here’s what that young man at the bank gave us this morning,” she said, stretching to hand the papers to me. “Why? What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know yet,” I admitted, scanning the papers through bleary eyes. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, tried again.
And the truth came into focus.
“Rocky opened the safe deposit box the day after the break-in.”
I didn’t need to explain; Sophie understood the significance. “So those newspaper articles, the scrapbook, that’s what the burglar was after.”
I wasn’t ready to say that for certain. “It’s what Rocky thought the burglar was looking for,” I pointed out. “And that’s because of the note.”
“Leave the past in the past.” Sophie exhaled the words on the end of a breath of amazement. “So Rocky did see that note stabbed into her dressing screen.”
“And didn’t say a word to anyone about it because she wasn’t sure what to make of it. She knew there was something she had that someone wanted her to keep quiet about, but what? Maybe even she didn’t know exactly what she had that someone might be after.”
We sat for a few minutes, but there is no such thing as quiet in a hospital, and there was little chance for us to try to make sense of the puzzle.
“We need to look through those articles again,” I told Sophie, who pointed out the obvious.
“They’re still in your car. Back at Pacifique.”
Declan wanted to help?
I reached for the bedside table and my phone, but stopped before I dialed his number. The last time I’d seen him was when he discovered I’d lied about Misti being sick and the date needing to be called off because I was needed at the Terminal. Something told me he wouldn’t appreciate me calling him now because I needed his help.
The same something that told me he had every right to be pissed.
“That doesn’t mean I can’t call him.” When I looked at Sophie in wonder, her face lit with a grin. “Oh, come on, Laurel. It doesn’t take a mind reader to figure you out. You need help, you reach for your phone, and the first person you’d naturally think to call is Declan. That’s what happens when two people fall in love.”
I opened my mouth to protest and when the words refused to form, I snapped it shut again without a word.
It was just as well. Sophie was already on the phone with Declan.
• • •
HE ARRIVED AT the hospital with a big box of chocolates for Sophie along with a bouquet of orange, purple, and yellow mums that were in a cute jack-o’-lantern vase and pleased her no end.
No flowers for me, and to tell the truth, I was actually relieved.
At least until the nurse who he’d somehow schmoozed into helping him trailed in behind him with a dozen yellow roses.
“Red is too showy,” he said, setting the vase of flowers on the windowsill next to my bed. “Yellow is cheerier.”
“I don’t need cheering.” I could have kicked myself the second the words were out of my mouth. They were bratty and he didn’t deserve that. I swallowed hard. “The flowers are very pretty and . . . and thank you for bringing them.”
“You’re welcome.” He perched himself on the side of my bed and maybe I was imagining it, maybe I was thinking that rifts between people could be healed so easily and with so few words. Maybe I knew better. Or maybe at least I should have.
