The mood was somber as they filed out of Gretchen’s house. Sienna leaned up against Juliet’s police car and took a few deep breaths.
“I don’t know if she’ll bounce back this time,” Sienna said. “She’s tough, and she’s a fighter, but come on. You know the first thing she said to me when I walked in and found her like that? ‘I told you Monique didn’t do it.’ And then she blacked out, or passed out, or whatever the hell happened.”
Was Gretchen trying to protect Monique, to keep her from going to jail for what Gretchen had actually done? There were still too many questions. “I thought you were in trouble again. This has really got to stop. My heart can’t take it. Quinlan wanted me to question Gretchen again. He thought that maybe she was the stone we left unturned.”
Sienna shook her head. “Wasn’t it Monique? I thought that part was evident.”
Juliet hadn’t had a chance to catch her up on the earlier events of the day. As far as Sienna was concerned, the case was still closed. “I’ll fill you in back at the station. You won’t believe it.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
Sienna sat at the kitchen table, utterly spent. Celeste handed her the salad dressing while Juliet scooped a pile of lettuce and other veggies onto her plate. Brooke was furiously buttering a dinner roll.
“I’m still in total shock. I know Tara personally. She used to come into my shop all the time for the aloe bars. We would shoot the shit a little, she’d tell me about library gossip, about her boyfriend’s antics, and I’d talk about you,” Brooke said, nudging Celeste.
“What was her boyfriend’s name?” Juliet asked, drenching her salad with Thousand Island.
“She never told me his name. Said she didn’t want to say anything until he told his family. Because they…” Brooke trailed off, seemingly realizing what she was saying. “Oh. Huh.”
“Why did you never tell me that?” Celeste asked. She looked at Brooke incredulously.
Brooke shrugged. “How would that even come up? I talk to people all day every day. Do you want me to come home and tell you about Elvira Houston’s gout? Or Louis Zipp’s tomato garden failures?”
Celeste nodded. “Good point. But with what happened to Rich Kowalski, I’d have thought you’d say something.”
“You didn’t tell me she was a suspect and I didn’t think twice about it. Your big line is always, ‘I can’t talk about an active case, Brooke. It’s confidential.’” Brooke imitated Celeste’s voice.
“Well, it is,” Celeste said. She petulantly stabbed a cucumber.
“What did she say about him?” Sienna asked.
“Not much, really. Just little things about gifts he’d given her and late-night phone calls, and how they had so much in common, that kind of thing,” Brooke said.
“I know about the gifts,” Juliet said. “Didn’t see too many late-night phone calls on his cell records though. A few after the library had closed, but those could have been business related.”
“It’s really a tragedy all around. She obviously needed help, and Rich paid the price with his life. Monique will still go to jail, and Goodman will too. And Gretchen has so much to deal with. My heart breaks for her,” Sienna said. She really was concerned about Gretchen making a full recovery after what had happened earlier. She’d fought long and hard through the last injury, but without any immediate family left to support her, it might be a lot more difficult this time around.
“I know what you mean. It’s so sad. Not to change the subject, but I’m still in shock about this.” Brooke wagged her finger between Juliet and Sienna. “So, you guys are a thing now? For real?”
Sienna looked at Juliet. She wasn’t sure how much they should be saying or not saying, and she didn’t want to overstep with Juliet’s friends.
Juliet smiled. “Yes. For real.”
“I should have known something was up the night we came over to watch the Sox game. You two were all nervous around each other and hyper aware of how close you were sitting next to each other. I can sense these things,” Brooke said.
“Oh please, you had no idea,” Celeste interjected and rolled her eyes.
“Just eat your salad.” Brooke waved her fork. “I did too. Are you living here now?”
Sienna shook her head. “Not exactly. I’m just squatting here until something close by opens up.”
“Makes sense,” Brooke said. “How’s Will taking it?”
Silence fell. Celeste looked down at her plate and Juliet took a long sip of water.
“Not good,” Sienna offered. She gave a tight smile and refilled her water glass.
“Hint taken,” Brooke said and thankfully, let it go. “Let’s talk about something lighter, like religion and politics.”
It was so strange yet so comfortable, sitting at the dinner table with Juliet and her friends, doing things that couples did without giving them a second thought. The last time she’d sat down to dinner with Will and anyone else was when her cousin and her husband had flown in from Florida a few years back. Will had left the table to get some work done when the conversation had turned to Sienna’s family. If she had to pinpoint a moment when she’d realized that she wanted more out of marriage and companionship and love, and that she had to do something about it, that might have been it.
Juliet seemed to realize that Sienna was deep in thought and reached over to give her knee a quick squeeze. When Sienna looked up, Juliet winked at her in the most adorable way. Sienna hadn’t realized how much those little things meant to her. Allowing themselves to be together wasn’t just the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do.
* * *
“Morning, Nancy,” Sienna said into her cell phone. Her supervisor had called her back after she’d heard Sienna’s lengthy message, explaining Gretchen’s current situation. “I’ll be able to check on Gretchen in the hospital, but otherwise my schedule is open at this point.”
She was sitting at Juliet’s kitchen table, since she couldn’t imagine staying alone in a hotel room after what had happened with Gretchen, but she was going to get a room for the upcoming night, come hell or highwater. Her stay at Juliet’s could be chalked up to unfortunate circumstances. Juliet walked by and placed a light kiss on Sienna’s neck on her way to the kitchen. The sensation brought the previous night’s activities into clear view. Sienna needed to ignore the flip-flop in her stomach and refocus her attention on work.
“Sure, I can do that,” Sienna said, writing some notes on an old menu she’d found in Juliet’s junk drawer. Her next case would begin in the next few days. In the meantime, she had a novel-length report to prepare on Gretchen’s accident, recovery, attack, and hopefully her recovery from the attack.
Juliet handed her a cup of coffee, three creams and one sugar, just how she liked it. “Mmm, thank you.”
“Welcome. We have to go in and do another top to bottom sweep of Tara’s apartment today. Her parents are flying in from Chicago to make arrangements. Sometimes you forget that when the ‘bad’ guy dies, it still leaves a hole in a lot of people’s hearts.”
“I see that a lot more often than I’d care to admit,” Sienna said. She sipped her coffee. “Not all of my clients are the proverbial good guy, that’s for sure.”
“Okay, I better get going. We need to figure out Tara’s motive for going after Gretchen, and about a thousand other things today. I’ll check in with you in a bit,” Juliet said, lacing up her shoe.
Sienna stood and opened her arms for Juliet to fall into. They hugged for a full minute and then Juliet kissed her tenderly. Sienna was fairly certain that this was what heaven would be like. Without all of the deceit and murder, of course.
As she was finishing getting ready to head into the office, Sienna’s text alert went off. It was a message from Celeste, who had just left the hospital.
Gretchen is awake, sort of. She asked if you could let her knitting group know what happened. She said it’s her turn to make the prayer shawl this month, and now she won’t finish it. I assured
her they would understand, given the circumstances, but she still wants you to let them know. She said the group email is on the computer. If not in inbox, check spam. Password to get in is richgretch37.
Celeste finished it off with a shrug emoji.
She just woke up from being stabbed and that’s what she’s worried about? Lol. I’ll make sure they get word and please let her know I’ll be by afterward.
Celeste responded with a thumbs-up.
Driving to Gretchen’s felt surreal. Knowing that she wouldn’t be there, that she’d been attacked again, that Monique was in a prison cell somewhere…it was too much. Though Sienna had never really cared for Monique, she’d gotten used to her being around.
The area around Gretchen’s house was still taped off. Sienna pulled her badge out of her bag, but the officer working at the scene recognized her and nodded at her that she was cleared to go in.
Gretchen’s laptop was in the same spot it had been when they’d paid her bills the other day. On a tray table pushed up against the family room wall, the mouse sitting on top like an electronic guardian. She opened it up and entered Gretchen’s password.
The background of a sandy beach appeared. She opened the webmail client that Rich had renamed “RICH AND GRETCH EMAILS.” Sienna tried to ignore the prickliness she felt at seeing 23,668 unread email messages in the inbox.
She didn’t see anything that jumped out at her as a knitting group email in the first few pages of the inbox, so she decided to look elsewhere. Sienna let out a groan at seeing 2,335 messages in the spam folder. She’d hoped that the reason Gretchen’s laptop was so slow was because of how old it was, and not a virus she’d let in through spam. None of the messages had been clicked on, and since nearly all of the messages had to do with anatomy enlargements and overseas dating, that was a good thing. She went over to page two, where nothing there had been clicked either. Her eyes were drawn to the only message in the folder that didn’t have hearts or tongues in the subject line. It was a message from Tara Wolfe dated August 23. The night that Richard Kowalski had died.
Sienna stared at the name for what felt like hours. She brought the mouse pointer over to the message and clicked the subject line, which read, “Good-bye.”
At the top of the message, in bright red font, the email client announced that the message appeared to be spam because it was an unrecognized address that had been flagged on other websites. Sienna clicked ignore and proceeded to the message.
Dear Gretchen,
Things have progressed to a point where we can no longer lie to you. I know that this is going to hurt, and I am sorry for that. But Rich and I are in love, and even though we can’t be together in this world, we will surely be together in the next. You still have so much—your daughter, your friends, your church groups. Rich is all that I have, and all that I need. But I can’t keep pretending that you don’t exist and that he truly belongs to me. By this time tomorrow, we’ll be in heaven, or hell, or wherever people go when this life is through with them, but we’ll be together, as it should be. I can assure you that Rich loved you, and that we never meant for this to happen.
We’ll have one last drink tonight, in your honor.
Tara
Sienna’s thoughts were moving so quickly she didn’t know what to do first. She forwarded the email to Juliet and texted her to read her email, immediately. She went back to the inbox and waded through page after page until she found an email that came from “GRETCH’S KNITTING LADIES.” She was able to click on that and compose a quick note to let them know why Gretchen would be unable to fulfill her prayer shawl duties for the month. She was vague and left out most details, but the message would still get across. She slammed the lid of the laptop shut and sat in Gretchen’s chair, wondering if life would ever feel normal again.
Chapter Thirty-eight
“What the fuck is this?” Juliet asked aloud, while reading her email from her phone. She opened it up as soon as she’d received Sienna’s text. She blasted it to Quinlan, Celeste, Leland, and Deagle.
Quinlan walked down Tara’s stairs reading the email on his phone. “Where did she find this?” he asked.
“She was on Gretchen’s laptop sending something to a knitting group. Found it in the junk mail folder. Guess we’re lucky she saw this before it was lost in spam hell forever. So, Tara planned on taking them both out that night. She mustn’t have been able to go through with it,” Juliet said, the hair on her arms standing on end.
“This is un-fucking believable,” Quinlan said. “She’s been under our noses the whole time.”
They all looked at the usually reserved chief, but none of them said anything.
“Make sure the tech guys go through Wolfe’s personal computer piece by piece,” Quinlan said to Celeste. She nodded. “Didn’t we already go through her email? And his?”
“We did, yes. This came from some other account, and definitely didn’t originate on her work computer. They looked at her laptop, too, but a lot of people have more than one these days. Rich’s email was clean as a whistle. This one seems like an old account that he set up for him and Gretchen, but I’d guess Gretchen used it most. Look, it’s an AOL account.” Juliet held up her phone. Not that anyone needed to look at it, since she’d sent them all the email.
“So, what ended up as solely a murder was supposed to be a murder/suicide. But I still don’t understand why that would make her attack Gretchen after the fact. Was she pissed off that her grand plan didn’t work? That she couldn’t go through with it?” Leland asked.
“I don’t know that we’ll ever find out,” Juliet said, rereading the email for the tenth time. “She obviously had a lot of feelings toward Gretchen for being the one ‘standing in the way’ of her and Rich. Maybe she said more to Gretchen before she stabbed her. Thank God she didn’t have very good aim.”
“This is like a twisted game of whodunit,” Deagle said, his face buried in his phone. “And the answer is: everybody done it.”
“Collect everything you can,” Quinlan said. “If there is anything else that points to her being the one to kill Kowalski, we need to find it. I want that whiskey bottle retested. See if they can match Wolfe’s print to that partial. Somebody see if Gretchen’s awake enough to talk to us.”
Juliet volunteered to check on Gretchen. Sienna would probably be there by then, and she seemed to be able to get Gretchen to open up better than anyone.
She drove to the hospital and raced up the stairs to the second floor, where Gretchen was located this time around. Juliet found it hard to believe it had been less than three months since the first time Gretchen was stretched out on a hospital bed, hooked up to innumerable machines and medicine bags. Thankfully, Sienna was sitting by her side.
“Good, you’re here,” Juliet said. Sienna was the proverbial sight for sore eyes, and she was grateful that she didn’t have to see Gretchen alone.
“Hey,” Sienna whispered. “She’s sleeping. When she was awake a little while ago, I asked her if she’d ever received anything from Tara by email and she was confused by what I meant. She said she didn’t think so, and she’d have remembered that email if she’d seen it, especially after he died.”
“Yeah, I agree. Did she say if Tara said anything else when she showed up at her house?” Juliet asked. She pulled one of the vinyl chairs over to Sienna and sat next to her.
“Not really. I’m not a hundred percent convinced that she knew Tara was talking about Rich as the only man she’d ever loved. When I mentioned Rich’s name in that context, she asked if I was mixed up. I didn’t want to keep confusing her, not when she’s like this. I figured it could wait.” Sienna gently moved Gretchen’s hand so that the IV wasn’t buckled beneath it. “She seemed to understand that Tara was the one who poisoned Rich, but I don’t think she fully grasps why.”
“Well, that’s awful. I wasn’t sure there was anything left to make this whole thing more terrible, but there it is. It’ll be fun having that discussion with her, telling
her that Rich’s co-worker was convinced they were having an affair and that’s why he’s dead. And if her daughter had gone through with her own scheme, he would’ve been dead by her hand. I mean, come on,” Juliet said. She leaned her elbow on the arm of the chair and massaged her forehead. She was sure it would return to normal at some point, but the town she knew and loved and felt so much a part of, a town that hadn’t seen a murder in twenty years, seemed completely tainted. “I suppose in some sense, we’re lucky. More than a third of murders go unsolved. We could have been spinning our wheels for the next year and come up with nothing.”
“True,” Sienna said. She rubbed her hand up and down Juliet’s arm. “I have to go to my office for a bit. I have stacks of paperwork to complete. I suppose it’s my own fault for letting it pile up. I’m so grateful my boss let me spend this kind of time with her,” she said, nodding at Gretchen.
“Okay, go ahead. I’ll hang out with her for a little while. I’m picking up Declan tonight for dinner. Promised I’d take him to Casa Mañana for some nachos. You want to come?” Juliet asked.
Sienna smiled. “No, you spend some time with Declan tonight. Maybe I’ll take him out over the weekend, and we can just ply him with fast food until he forgives us.”
Juliet laughed. “Sounds like a plan. I’ll see you tonight,” she said.
Sienna nodded and blew her a kiss.
Juliet sat back in the chair, the hum of Gretchen’s machines lulling her into a false sense of relaxation. When Gretchen was still out an hour later, and Juliet wasn’t sure if she had dozed off in the chair or not, she headed back to the police station to see if anything else had been uncovered. The nurse at the desk outside of Gretchen’s room promised to call if and when Gretchen woke up.
* * *
Juliet could have beeped the horn or texted Declan to tell him she was outside, but the last thing she wanted to be was a coward. She knocked on the front door and took a step back to wait for someone to answer the door.
Heart of the Storm Page 25
