by J. D. Griffo
“Why would she recant her story after asking the court to issue a restraining order?” Alberta questioned. “Getting one of those things isn’t automatic. You have to prove that there’s a reason, no?”
Vinny sighed heavily and Alberta noticed that his hands were no longer clasped in front of him but opening and closing as if he couldn’t decide if he wanted to strangle Alberta or clock her in the nose. “Because Nola was and still is a very dramatic young woman, and she jumped to a very wrong conclusion. Once she realized her mistake she did the right thing, which was to clear a good man’s name.”
Alberta noticed the same tone in Vinny’s voice as when he was talking to Kichiro. He was trying to protect Jonas for some reason. Maybe he couldn’t bring him back to life, but at least he could protect his character.
“So Jonas hadn’t been stalking Nola?”
“No, Alberta, he hadn’t!”
“Then what exactly had he been doing?”
“Why don’t you and your granddaughter stick your noses further where they don’t belong and find out?”
They were both startled by Vinny’s words and their intensity. Although she knew she was pushing the limits of their friendship and delving into police matters that really didn’t concern her, and Vinny’s outburst was the result of his frustration about the case as well as his genuine concern for her and Jinx, all she could hear was that another man was trying to control her life.
“Thanks for the suggestion, Vinny,” Alberta said tersely. “Jinx and I will do just that.”
Swiveling in his chair to face his computer, Vinny added, “I didn’t expect anything less.”
While Alberta gathered her thoughts to think of something witty or civil to say in order to end her visit on friendlier or at least less ambiguous terms, Vinny beat her to it by being blunt.
“And shut the door behind you on your way out.”
* * *
Before Jinx opened the door to St. Winifred’s Academy, she heard the screaming. She had no way of knowing that Sharon was yelling at Nola in an even louder voice than Vinny had been shouting at Kichiro, she only knew that she was walking in on a volatile conversation. She also had no way of knowing that Sharon was using almost the same words that Vinny had.
“What is wrong with you lately?” Sharon screamed. “And don’t give me that ‘I’m sorry’ crap because I don’t want to hear it.”
“Sharon, you of all people, should know that I’m dealing with a lot of personal stuff right now,” Nola replied.
“You think you’re the only one?!”
Jinx didn’t know if Nola agreed or challenged Sharon’s question because whatever Nola said in reply, she said it quietly. Jinx had followed the voices down the hallway right up to the door of Nola’s classroom, but by the time she arrived could only hear the muffled sounds of a normal conversation. The argument had been intense, but short, and was now over. When Sharon flung the door open, however, it was obvious that the tension remained.
“Mrs. Basco,” Jinx blurted out. “Hi.”
Flustered, it took Sharon a moment to focus her attention on Jinx and reply. “Hello . . . oh . . . Jinx . . . well . . . yes . . . hi.”
Looking like a woman out of one of those old Douglas Sirk melodramas of the 1950s, Sharon smoothed out her tight, houndstooth skirt and then put a wayward strand of hair back into place by brushing her palm across the side of her face. It was a theatrical gesture, unnecessary, but effective in allowing Sharon to appear as if she was adjusting her physical appearance when what she was doing was modifying her mood for her audience. Finished, Sharon flashed Jinx a smile that positively beamed. Wow, Jinx thought, Sharon’s a darn good actress. Had Jinx not heard the arguing that directly preceded her performance, she would have considered Sharon’s expression genuine.
“What brings you to our neck of the woods?” Sharon asked. “And might I add that you look amazing in red. It should be your signature color.”
Jinx became flustered, not because of the compliment—she knew the red leather jacket was the perfect accent to her long black hair and olive complexion—but because the ease in which Sharon switched gears from hostile to hostess was frightening.
“Really? You think so? Okay . . . thank you,” Jinx stammered, sounding like Sharon did a few moments earlier. “The jacket is my Aunt Joyce’s, she’s not only a great painter, a former financial bigwig, but a fashion maven, too.”
At the mention of Joyce’s name, Sharon’s demeanor relapsed a bit, but the retreat into calmer territory was short-lived. “She does have a wonderfully creative flair about her,” Sharon gushed. “Especially for a former Wall Street wizard . . . or wizardess . . . number crunchers are usually so boringly unartistic.”
“Like most women she has multiple sides to her personality,” Jinx praised.
“That is true, most of us do,” Sharon agreed, then quickly apologized and shifted the conversation once again. “I wish I could stay longer and chat, but I have so much work to catch up on, and if I don’t get home at a reasonable hour tonight to start dinner, I think my husband will finally make good on his threat to file for divorce.”
“Don’t let me stop you,” Jinx replied. “I would never come between a man and his wife.”
Sharon started walking down the hallway and then turned around to address Nola, but never stopped moving so she was walking backward. “And remember, Nola, I need those assessments on my desk by nine a.m. tomorrow morning.” When she was finished she turned around to continue walking without missing a beat. Sharon Basco was not someone who wasted time.
Closing the classroom door behind her, Jinx pulled one of the student chairs closer to Nola’s and sat down. “What was that all about?”
Shrugging her shoulders, Nola smiled, “Just a regular day here at St. Winnie’s.”
“You get screamed at like that every day?”
“Not me personally,” Nola said, “But . . . each day someone gets yelled at. It’s nothing, just the way Sharon lets off steam.”
“Doesn’t seem right to me,” Jinx stated. “I mean Wyck will throw a tantrum every once in a while, but he rarely screams at someone unless they really screwed up. And since this is a Catholic school shouldn’t people be nicer to each other?”
In response, Nola laughed so hard that she almost fell out of her chair. She slammed her hand down on her desk to stop herself from falling over and hit a small porcelain bowl filled with paper clips. Jinx lunged forward and grabbed the bowl before it crashed to the ground but couldn’t stop the paper clips from scattering all over the floor.
The incident reminded her of when she caught Lori’s vase, stopping it from smashing on the floor. So did the bowl. The pattern was the same, a very common blue and white Chinese porcelain.
“Thank you!” Nola squealed. “This . . . this was a gift.”
“From Kichiro?” Jinx teased, scooping up the paper clips from the floor.
Nola paused and looked at Jinx as if trying to determine if she was joking in a friendly manner or being bitchy. “Maybe,” she replied inconclusively. “So what brings you by? Are you here as a roomie or reporter?”
Jinx’s instinct was to lie and say the former, but Nola knew her quite well and would see through her ruse only to get annoyed at the deception. Better to be honest.
“I found out something about Jonas that I’m hoping you can clarify,” she said.
“Sure,” Nola replied, dragging out the word to sound much longer than its one syllable. “What did you find out?”
Nola began to fumble through papers on her desk. She didn’t look at them, only shuffled them from side to side. Jinx knew this was a tactic Nola employed whenever she wanted to avoid a subject so in order to put her friend at ease, Jinx thought it best to act as nonchalant as possible and not make Nola feel as if she was being interrogated. To create some distance between them, Jinx walked to the window and gazed out at the school grounds.
“Did you file a restraining order against Jonas a few yea
rs ago?” Jinx asked.
Jinx immediately cursed her positioning because instead of looking at Nola’s face to see how she responded to her questioning, she was staring outside. She fought the impulse to turn around abruptly because that felt like a maneuver from an old crime show—ask a volatile question and then turn violently on your heel. Not the kind of action that inspires unguarded dialogue. Maintaining her stance proved to be the right choice.
“You know something, yes, yes I did do that,” Nola finally replied. “It was such a long time ago I forgot about it.”
Jinx sat on the windowsill and turned to face Nola, but continued to steal glances out the window to keep up her air of indifference. “Really? I mean it isn’t every day that you take legal action against someone, especially someone who was creepy like your students said.”
“Creepy? Jonas? Not at all.”
“But Nola, you don’t take out a restraining order on someone who isn’t creepy. You only call in the police to protect you when someone scares you and makes you feel unsafe,” Jinx asserted. “Why were you scared of Jonas?”
“Scared of Jonas?” Nola cried. “Don’t be silly. He was a gentle soul. A bit kooky, but gentle.”
“So you weren’t frightened of him, but you still wanted him to keep his distance from you?”
“I overreacted,” Nola admitted. “I think you should know me well enough to know that I have a teeny tiny tendency to do that.”
Jinx didn’t have to think that one over for a second. She agreed completely with Nola’s self-description. But her silence did the trick and it compelled Nola to explain herself in further detail.
“He had been staring at me in a way that I thought was maybe a bit too much,” Nola explained. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but some of the students picked up on it and I got nervous and a bit overprotective as their teacher so I filed the restraining order. Almost immediately I realized such a drastic action was unnecessary. I spoke with Jonas, which I should’ve done in the first place, asked him to please stop, and he did.”
“Just like that?” Jinx asked.
“Yup, just like that.”
Nola started rambling on about something that Jinx thought included Kichiro and Freddy, but she wasn’t listening fully, she was digesting the information Nola had shared and she was even more interested in what she noticed on the lawn. Outside almost every window were clusters of flowers. She saw daisies, some white roses, hydrangeas like the ones that decorated Alberta’s cottage, even a colorful array of wildflowers. Flowers, flowers everywhere except outside of Nola’s classroom window where there was only grass. And brown grass at that.
“L’erba è sempre più verde,” Jinx muttered to herself.
“What did you say?” Nola asked.
“Just something I read in my Italian phrase book,” Jinx replied. “The grass is always greener. The, um, flowers on the school’s property are beautiful.”
“And ironic.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s all thanks to Jonas.”
“Jonas?”
“He was our groundskeeper,” Nola said.
“Really?”
“That’s why he was around a lot,” Nola explained.
“I thought he worked for the town.”
“That was his main job, but he did some work for us too, and a few other places I think. He really had a green thumb. Unfortunately, I’m just the opposite.”
Nola stood next to Jinx at the window and looked at the brown patch of dead earth right underneath her window. “Jonas would say it’s like I poured some kind of lethal pesticide all over the dirt to kill any life that was trying to grow.”
It was as if a voice from beyond the grave had offered Jinx another clue.
CHAPTER II
Dente avvelenato.
When Jinx heard the knock at the front door the next evening she had no idea that the voice from beyond the grave had followed her home.
She left Freddy, Nola, and Kichiro sitting in the living room to open the door and froze when she was greeted by Vinny and a young female detective, whom she recognized, but whose name she didn’t remember. None of that mattered. All that was important was that the police were at her apartment and it was all her fault.
“Hi Jinx,” Vinny said. His voice was that awkward mix of apologetic, professional, and forced cheerful. He didn’t want to be standing at her front door, Jinx didn’t want him to be standing at her front door, but both knew that Vinny and his underling were only standing at her front door because they were there on police business.
For a split second Jinx thought if she closed the door and sat back on the couch next to Freddy, they would disappear. Before she could test out her theory, Kichiro ruined everything by calling out to his boss.
“Chief, what are you doing here? Is there an emergency?”
“No,” Vinny replied.
“An emergency? Here?” Nola asked.
Either Vinny forgot why he had come or he was too embarrassed to admit it, but he remained silent. Leaning back on the couch, his stocking clad feet still propped up on the coffee table, Freddy raised a hand and said, “Hey Tambra, what’s going on?”
Now that the female cop had a first name it was almost as if they were just another couple who came over to hang out. Jinx and Freddy, Nola and Kichiro, Vinny and Tambra. They sounded like a real couple, so why weren’t they acting like one? Why were they acting like cops?
“Tambra, seriously, what’s going on?” Freddy asked.
Obviously well-trained in protocol, Tambra allowed her boss to answer Freddy’s question. “We have a search warrant,” he announced. “To search the, um, premises.”
“These premises?” Nola repeated, her quizzical expression indicating that she considered it a very real possibility that the police had knocked on the wrong apartment door.
Nola looked over at Kichiro and her confusion quickly turned to amusement. She smiled and shook her head, her eyes raised like a mother bewildered, but accepting, of her naughty child. “Of course!” she squealed. “The Tranquility Police Department has nothing better to do on a Thursday night than play a practical joke on one of their own.”
Nola got up and picked up the half-empty bottle of merlot from the coffee table and asked, “Are you officially on duty or can I pour two more glasses?”
Had Nola been drunk, Vinny’s reply would have been enough to sober her right up.
“Please put the wine down, Nola,” he ordered, quietly, but firmly. “This isn’t a joke.”
Slowly, Nola placed the wine bottle back onto the table without taking her eyes off of Vinny, perhaps hoping that he would flash a huge grin to let her know that he was, in fact, kidding, and his presence was, indeed, part of some police hijinks. But his dour expression didn’t change, and it was clear to everyone that this was no joking matter.
“Dude, are you serious?” Freddy asked.
Jinx placed a hand on her boyfriend’s shoulder and answered for Vinny. “I think it’s very serious, Freddy, isn’t that right, Vinny?”
“I wouldn’t have a search warrant in my hand if it weren’t.”
“Okay, playtime is over,” Nola said, unconsciously slipping into her teacher voice. “What’s this all about? Why do you have a warrant to search our apartment? If you left something here, all you had to do was ask and we’d look for it.”
Jinx wasn’t sure if her roommate was naïve or desperate, but clearly she didn’t understand the seriousness of the situation. Vinny and Tambra were standing in their living room holding a legal document that gave them the right to search every nook and cranny of the two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment that they shared, not to search for something they had lost but to uncover evidence that they felt was integral to a current police investigation. Nola either didn’t comprehend this or was acting disingenuous, and, sadly, Jinx wasn’t sure which one it was. She did know, however, that no amount of stalling was going to prevent the police from doing their job.
&n
bsp; “Nola, I don’t think Vinny’s here to look for something he left behind,” Jinx cautioned. “He’s searching for something he hasn’t found yet.”
“Then tell us what it is, Vinny, and we’ll help you look,” Nola declared. “I mean we have a cop right here who’s trained to do exactly this kind of thing.”
Kichiro seemed to be startled at the acknowledgment of his presence. Prior to that he had been lost in thought, far removed from the proceedings, but when Nola offered up his services he was yanked back to reality.
“Uh, yeah, su-su-sure,” Kichiro stammered. “How c-can I help?”
As an afterthought, Kichiro stood up and although he didn’t move forward to cross the room and join his colleagues, his body was restless. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, he flicked the tip of his nose with his finger, he clasped his hands briefly in front of him before placing his right arm on his hip, only to change position again to wind up with his left arm crossed in front of his chest holding onto his right elbow. Even then in his chosen final position he couldn’t remain still and his index finger rubbed the skin just above his elbow back and forth looking like a caterpillar stuck in one position unable to move.
“All of you can help by staying exactly where you are and letting us do our job,” Vinny declared.
As a police officer Kichiro was used to accepting orders, especially from a superior, and merely nodded his head in response. Nola, as a teacher, was more familiar with being the person giving the orders so she was less cooperative. “This has gone far enough,” she said. “Why in the world do you want to search our apartment?”
Vinny exhaled a long breath through his nose and then said the words he clearly dreaded speaking out loud, but knew he was legally bound to convey. “We have reason to believe that there is evidence in this apartment in connection with the murder of Jonas Harper.”
“What?”
Jinx prayed no one noticed she had remained silent and wasn’t part of Freddy, Nola, and Kichiro’s simultaneous outburst. Ignoring the question, Vinny gave the search warrant to Jinx and then indicated to Tambra that it was time to get to work.
