“Should we sell it?” Billy had asked me when I first returned to Santa Sofia.
“I think it would break his heart. He needs to hold on to her.”
I wasn’t sure Billy understood what my dad was going through or why his emotions were tied to every little thing that my mother had touched, but I got it. If he started to get rid of things, he’d be shedding his memories of her bit by bit. I think he saw that as a betrayal of her. That somehow, from wherever she was, she’d look down and see that he’d moved on and that she wasn’t mourned anymore. It was not true, of course, but he had to grieve in his own way and at his own pace.
We all did.
I needed to start today.
I walked into the kitchen, took the only set of car keys hanging from the mounted hook there, went back to the garage, and rounded the back end of the pearl-white Fiat crossover my mom had loved. Once inside it, I started the engine. It roared to life, and seconds later I backed the car out and parked it on the driveway. I had considered a short jaunt around the block but had decided against it. Baby steps. Even sitting in the car, surrounded by the still new-smelling black interior, made me choke up.
“Big enough for grandkids,” Mom had told me with a smile and a wink when she’d picked it out.
Grandkids she’d never get to meet. Babies who’d never know their grandmother. I choked back the lump that had risen in my throat. It was just a car, but remembering how carefully my mom had picked it out, how she’d envisioned driving around her grandbabies in it, and how she’d loved it made my dad’s decision to keep it all the more reasonable. I didn’t want him to sell it, either.
I drew in a bolstering breath as I got out of the car and went back into the garage. “Stay focused,” I told myself. “Just one box.”
I set up one of my dad’s collapsible lawn chairs, grabbed the first box, hauled it from the stack along the wall, and sat down with it. The box was labeled CLASSROOM BOOKS, and sure enough, it was full of teaching manuals, books on instructional strategies, and games for the high school English classroom. I searched through the box, flipping through a few books in case there was anything personal tucked away, but there was nothing. This was truly just a box of books my mom had felt were important enough to own print copies of.
I overlapped the cardboard flaps, closing the box again, and retrieved the next box from the stack. This one, labeled DESK, held all the miscellaneous stuff my mom had kept in her desk drawers. Clear acrylic containers of paper clips, staples, Post-it notes, a vast collection of pens and pencils, with a heavy emphasis on colorful Paper Mate Flair pens. “They’re perfect for grading papers,” she’d told me once when she’d bought a jumbo pack of them. “I try to stay away from the dreaded red. Grading in purple makes me happy.”
I closed up the box, set it aside, and took another one down. STUDENT WORK. Inside was a series of file folders holding students’ essays. The folders were dated and organized by year and went back a decade. Each folder held anywhere from one to five essays.
I took a closer look at a few of the writing pieces. They weren’t originals but had been photocopied. Just like the one I’d found in Jackie’s kitchen. I got to thinking. Had my mom been Jasmine’s teacher? I ran through some possibilities in my mind and finally settled on the idea that if Jasmine had been in my mom’s class, my mother might have created a copy of the essay because of the cryptic nature of it and given it to Jasmine’s mother. What really struck me, however, was that it was quite possible that my mother had actually known Jackie Makers, that they’d been connected, even if it was only slightly. The realization gave me a chill.
I refocused on the essays. Did teachers regularly keep copies of their students’ writing? Pastel-colored sticky notes adhered to many of the samples. Notes my mother had made. One said: College admittance UCLA. On another she’d written: 3/15 Contacted counselor and mother Re: cutting. A third noted: Use as exemplary next year.
My mom had copied and kept select student writings for a variety of reasons, ranging from concern to pride. I had a faint recollection of overhearing my mom telling my dad, “Somebody was Barack Obama’s teacher. Someone taught Ronald Reagan and Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp. One of my students may go on to do great things. If they do, maybe I’ll be able to say, ‘Look! Here’s an essay Frances wrote on Julius Caesar back in her sophomore year of high school!’”
I laughed at the memory. My mom, the dreamer. She knew she was making a difference in the lives of her students. They came to her with their problems, their failures, and their triumphs. They trusted her, and she loved them. She respected them. And right here in front of me was the proof.
I pulled out a random file from the box. It was filled with copies of several essays from the previous year. They were all literary responses to Bless Me, Ultima; Death of a Salesman; The Grapes of Wrath; and The Great Gatsby, among others. I smiled, proud. My mom knew how to challenge her students.
I spent another hour looking through her boxes, memories flooding me. How many hours had I spent helping her set up her classroom every August, and then helping pack it all up again at the end of each school year so the room could be cleaned or so she could move to a new room? Countless. As a teenager, I’d hated being asked to spend days of my summer vacation helping, but looking back now just made me smile. Those were good memories. Time with my mom that I now treasured and wouldn’t trade for anything.
My cell phone beeped, bringing me back to the present. It was a text from Emmaline.
Back in the office. Call whenever.
A moment later a car door slammed, and my younger brother, Billy, strode into the garage, set down a bag he was carrying, then stooped to give me a peck on the cheek. “What’s going on here?”
“Looking at some of mom’s school stuff.”
Billy had gotten my dad’s dark brown hair and hazel eyes, as well as his tall, lean build. At thirty-three, he was an eligible bachelor in Santa Sofia. But his heart, if only he’d admit it, belonged to Emmaline Davis.
He sank to his haunches and pulled a random file from the box I still had open. “Anything interesting?”
“These are old student essays Mom kept copies of. This box goes back ten years.”
He glanced at the stack of twenty-plus boxes still lining the garage wall. “She taught for what? Twenty-eight years?”
She’d gotten her teaching credentials when Billy and I were little. I couldn’t remember exactly when, though. “Something like that.”
He flipped through the file folder, nodding. “Wish I could have had her as my teacher. My friends always loved her. Said she really ‘got’ them.”
“My friends said the same thing.” School policy had been that, because she was our mom, we couldn’t be in her class, so we’d both had Mrs. Jameson for sophomore English, then Mr. Lemon as seniors, when my mom had changed to twelfth grade English.
“She was a good teacher,” Billy said.
“And an even better mom,” I said.
“Are you looking for something in particular?”
I wondered if there was something that I was subconsciously hunting for, something I knew my mom had had in her classroom that I was hoping to find. I’d racked my brain, but if there was, it wasn’t rising to the surface. “No, nothing. I just wanted to be close to her. I miss her,” I said softly.
He moved closer and rested his hand on my back. “I do, too.”
We restacked the boxes, and I pulled the car back into the garage. Billy retrieved the bag he’d brought, and handed it to me.
“That’s a lot of kiwis,” I said.
He winked. “You know how Dad loves ’em.”
That he did. Kiwis. Berries. Mangos. Pretty much any fruit made our dad happy.
“Could you do a favor for me?” I asked, taking a kiwi from the bag and turning the fuzzy brown sphere around in my hand.
“Sure.” He didn’t even ask what it was. That was my brother. He was an inherently good guy. He followed me into the house. I set
the kiwis down, went to the couch, and returned to the kitchen holding out the envelope from Mrs. Branford. “Can you drop this at the sheriff’s office for me?”
His hand stopped in midair. “Uh, why? What is it?”
I gave him an abbreviated version of the Maple Street saga, ending with the letter campaign initiated by Jackie Makers against Buck Masterson. I concluded by saying, “Emmaline needs to see them.”
“You think this Masterson character might have had something to do with that woman’s murder?”
Leave it to Billy to sum it up in one succinct sentence. I answered with Mrs. Branford’s words. “Someone killed Jackie. And this guy, this Buck Masterson, he had a pretty good motive.”
“And you want Emmaline to take a look at the letters.”
Again, he cut to the chase.
“She’s in charge of the investigation,” I said by way of an answer.
Billy was nobody’s fool, least of all mine. He’d seen through me the second I mentioned Emmaline’s name. “Your matchmaking isn’t going to work, Ivy.”
“Relax, Billy. It’s not a date. You’re just dropping off an envelope.”
“And why, exactly, can’t you do it, when you need to explain the situation to her, anyway?”
It took it as a rhetorical question, so I didn’t bother to answer. Instead, I went with, “You know you and Emmaline are meant to be together.”
Billy closed his eyes, his eyelids fluttering with frustration. “We had our chance, Ivy. It didn’t work out.”
“You wouldn’t let it work out. There’s a difference. She cares about you. You care about her. So why can’t you just do something about it? You’re being stupid. Didn’t losing Mom teach you anything? Life is too short. You’re letting your chance at love slip right through your fingers.”
My brother was a handsome man. Five feet eleven inches, a gentle wave to his dark brown hair, broad shouldered, and fit. But when he scowled, like he was doing now, he looked a little menacing. I knew when to leave well enough alone.
But he surprised me by taking the envelope. “I’ll leave it with the receptionist,” he growled.
“That’s fine. Thanks. I’ll call Em later to fill her in.”
He snatched an apple from the fruit bowl and headed back out through the garage, leaving me to get ready for my stakeout with Penelope Branford.
Chapter Ten
This was my first stakeout, and I had the feeling it might be my last. Mrs. Branford was antsy in the passenger seat of my tiny car, and the potential hours we could sit here together stretched before me.
“What kind of car do you have? Maybe we should use it instead,” I suggested.
“Oh no, dear. I long since stopped driving,” she answered. “It’s been sitting in my garage for years. Who even knows if it would start at this point?”
I sighed, wishing I had a bigger car with more legroom and interior space. As it was, my little economy car barely let me turn my body and prop my camera in the open driver’s side window. If I ever did another stakeout, I’d find a different solution. Of course, I’d never have a reason to do another stakeout, so really it was a moot issue.
I considered our current situation and why we were here. Buck Masterson had a motive to want Jackie Makers out of his way. If he had anything to do with her murder, that gave me double the reason to want to catch him doing something incriminating.
I had my camera out, as well as a U-shaped beanbag support, which I’d propped over the window frame. Thankfully, it was a temperate seventy degrees this evening. I imagined those funny graphic T-shirts geared toward people who loved to sew and their resulting self-descriptions as fabricaholics. My passion for photography meant I had more camera equipment than any reasonable person might collect. Every spare dime I saved went to Nikon gear and paraphernalia. And every dime was well spent. Fabric was to a seamstress what camera lenses were to me. My own graphic T-shirt might say IF I CAN’T BRING MY CAMERA, I’M NOT GOING or I FLASH PEOPLE.
For the stakeout tonight, I’d chosen an 85mm lens with an f-stop of f/1.4. It was the fastest lens I owned. To the layman, this meant absolutely nothing and probably filled him or her with anxiety. Given the minimal ambient light on the street, to me the specs on this lens meant the difference between a black screen with no image, a mess of movement as the camera tried to capture light in the dark, and a halfway decent shot. Getting a shot of Buck Masterson and his wrongdoings was, in theory, possible. Now we just had to wait for the subject in question.
“That’s quite a setup you have,” Mrs. Branford commented once I had the four-inch camera lens propped on the beanbag.
I focused and took a practice shot, examining the digital screen to gauge the lighting and the adjustments I needed to make. “Let’s hope it pays off,” I said, but truth be told, I was a little doubtful. Buck Masterson would have to be a Class A idiot to do something blatantly illegal in full view of the neighborhood, and in my wildest dreams, I couldn’t actually fathom what we could catch him in the act of doing, anyway. But I wanted to make Mrs. Branford happy, and who knew? Maybe we’d get lucky and bust him doing something diabolical and nefarious. Stranger things had happened.
Ninety minutes later, we’d fallen silent. My rear end was numb, my neck ached from continually looking up and down the street for evidence of Buck Masterson, I was sleepy, and my back was stiff from the way I was angled in the seat of the car.
“I say we give it another thirty minutes, then call it a night,” I said grudgingly. I wanted to see what my lens could capture in the dark, but without a subject and short of sending Mrs. Branford out into the street to be a test subject for me, it seemed unlikely that I was going to get the opportunity.
Mrs. Branford’s response was a snort through her nose and a burst of air blowing between her lips. I snuck a look at her—sound asleep—and stifled a grin. I didn’t blame her. My eyelids were heavy with the weight of boredom. I’d fought the urge to give in to letting them close; Mrs. Branford had lost that fight.
A movement from across the street caught my attention. We were far enough away that only someone with bionic vision would be able to detect us sitting there. Still, I shrank back in my seat. We weren’t doing anything wrong, but I’d rather not explain to anyone about our stakeout. I peered through the eyehole in my camera, letting my super-powerful lens do the work for me. I drew in a sharp breath as recognition hit me. Buck Masterson was actually striding down Maple Street, but he wasn’t alone. Next to him was a woman with what looked to be red hair. She had a round middle and skinny legs, and her arms swung purposefully as she walked alongside Buck. Surely, this was Nanette, the wife and the person who’d stared intimidatingly at Mrs. Branford from the front porch.
I didn’t know her, but I already didn’t like her.
As they walked down the street, I depressed the shutter button on my camera, checked to make sure I was getting decent images, and waited. I continued to watch through my lens. The zoom allowed me to see their faces, gestures, and actions. Nanette Masterson turned her head and said something to her husband. He nodded and ushered her forward with a wave of his arm. She glanced over her shoulder once, then continued on at a brisker pace.
Suspicious. “Where is she going?” I muttered.
Next to me, Mrs. Branford stirred. “Where is who going?” Her words were slurred, but I caught the gist.
Buck and Nanette were on the opposite side of the street and far enough away that there was no way they could hear me, but still, I kept my voice at a stage whisper. “The Mastersons.”
Mrs. Branford sat bolt upright. Or at least as upright as her hunched shoulders and back would allow her to. “They’re out there?” She leaned forward to peer out the front windshield. “Where? Where are they?”
Instinctively, I shushed her, extending my arm and pointing south. “Right there. They were walking together, but Nanette said something to Buck, and then she started walking faster. They look like they’re up to something, but—” I didn
’t have the chance to finish my thought before I knew exactly where Nanette was headed. “Jackie’s house.”
Mrs. Branford clapped her hands triumphantly. “I knew it! Did you get a picture?”
Oh! In my excitement to see where Nanette Masterson was heading, I’d almost forgotten. Nanette was darting across the grass, bypassing the front walkway and door in favor of the side gate leading to the backyard. The area was tangentially lit from the street lamps. I hoped it was enough light to allow for some clear images. Click. Click. Click. I snapped picture after picture as she snuck onto Jackie Makers’s property, her husband following. But Buck didn’t go all the way through the gate to the backyard. Instead, he stood sentry at the fence, what looked like a cell phone in his hand. A security light shone down from the corner of the house, illuminating the area enough for me to get some halfway decent shots.
“Got ’em,” I said, taking a few more as Buck put his phone to his ear and spoke to someone.
I glanced at the front of the Tudor house as the blinds in the front living room parted and someone stared out. Buck had probably been talking to Nanette. Testing their covert operation and alert process, I presumed. Buck was the lookout, and Nanette had done the breaking and entering.
“They could be looking for the letters,” I said.
“But how would they even know about them?” Mrs. Branford mused.
“Remember that one man, Harold Reiny? He was pretty straightforward in his letter. Maybe he told Buck that his days on the historic district’s council were numbered.”
Mrs. Branford sat back, considering. Finally she nodded. “Yes, I think that’s possible. Harold is a pistol. He doesn’t mince words, and it’s gotten him in trouble on more than one occasion. Buck has no boundaries, and Harold has no filter. They’re like oil and water, you know. They have never gotten on.”
I debated our play. We hadn’t really thought about what our play would be if we actually saw the Mastersons doing something nefarious. We could continue to watch, document with pictures, and keep the incident to ourselves. After all, I hadn’t seen Nanette break into Jackie’s house, and although I took a picture of the cracked blinds, I knew there was no way I actually got a shot that captured her face.
Kneaded to Death Page 9
