It was mesmerizing. She would hold the pastry bag poised above a tiny cupcake, then squeeze and twist her wrist, and a perfect little charcoal gray flower would somehow emerge from the tip of the bag and plant itself in the center of the pale gray frosting that covered each cupcake.
"You're amazing," Maggie said.
Brooke glanced at Maggie, her stormy gray eyes the same color as the icing she was using. "I hate gray," she said glumly.
"Then why…?" Maggie asked.
"Bridal shower this afternoon at a mansion on The Row," she said shortly. "They ordered one hundred identical miniature cupcakes." She sighed. "Her wedding colors are light gray and dark gray, can you imagine?"
"Sounds… sophisticated," Maggie said, trying to be generous.
Brooke shot her a look. "Right. Sophisticated. Not dull and drab at all." She finished the final flower and stepped back to look over the work. She turned her head this way and that, making sure the design was perfect from all angles.
Then she set down the pastry bag. "I can just picture it. They'll settle down in a gray house with gray furniture and gray appliances, and they'll paint the baby's nursery gray, and drive gray cars."
Maggie laughed. "And their gray dog will chase their gray cat around on their gray floor and they'll all be happy as clams until they're old and gray."
"Gray clams," Brooke said. Then she asked, "Chocolate, caramel, or cinnamon latte this morning? You can have anything that's not gray."
Maggie laughed. "What about pumpkin spice?"
"Pumpkin spice is seasonal, and only when I'm forced into it," she grumbled.
"You're in a grumpy mood," Maggie pointed out.
"Frosting a hundred tiny gray cupcakes has broken my spirit," Brooke replied. "All the color has been drained out of my world."
"Pumpkin is a color," Maggie said, teasing.
"Pumpkin spice is a sales gimmick," Brooke insisted. "There's no pumpkin in it at all. It's really just chai spice without the cardamom and vanilla."
"Okay," Maggie said with a grin. "I'll take one chai, hold the cardamom and vanilla."
Brooke finally laughed. "You win. One pumpkin spice latte coming up."
While Brooke made the drink, Maggie turned to look out at the café. O'Riley's was a converted warehouse, and its worn-down look added to the homey, casual vibe that always made her feel relaxed.
At the moment the place was almost empty. The locals who hung around all year in Carita had gotten their drinks and left to go to work. And on this day, which was as gray as the frosting flowers, there were no tourists around to keep the place lively.
There were just a couple of customers hanging out. A young man sat at a rickety table reading on his phone. A woman sat on the broken sofa that had been shoved in a corner to keep it from collapsing. She had earbuds in and was typing on her laptop. They were both in their early twenties, and the thought sprang to Maggie's mind that in a perfect world they would have been sitting together, enjoying each other's company, but in this world they were strangers, each lost in their own world, never to meet.
It was that kind of a day.
Opposite the sofa stood a rundown upright piano that had once been glossy black. Now it was scarred from a dozen moves, and its keys had aged to blotchy yellow and cream tones.
Maggie went over to it and sat on the bench to look down at the keyboard. She took out her phone and snapped a picture of the keyboard.
She sent it in a text to Reese, with no other message.
He would know. He would know she was there, in their favorite place. The place where he would sit and play piano for her on quiet afternoons, wrapping music around them like a spell, conjuring up his old life when he'd been a rock star in a chart-topping band. Evoking the days when he'd been young and immortal and destructively addicted to drugs and fame.
It seemed so long ago. But now he was away. Away from his music, and away from the safe little world he'd been trying to create here in Carita, far from Hollywood and fame and the constant pull of attraction people felt for him. The place where he could be himself, small-town boy Stanley Tibbets, and she could see him for who he was, and not for what the world wanted him to be. And they could pretend, just for a little while, that they were both normal and the world outside didn't matter.
She reached out and put her hand on the keyboard, but she didn't know how to play. Still, she ran one finger across the ivories, feeling the worn smoothness of the individual keys that gave under the slight pressure of her fingertip.
She shivered.
"Cold?" Brooke asked. She was holding a latte in a tall blue mug. The scent of cinnamon wafted toward Maggie, and she tried to feel happy.
This was her happy place. It was a good place.
"What's wrong?" Brooke asked.
"Lauren's dead, Reese is gone, and Ibarra kissed me on the lips," Maggie blurted out. Everything was wrong. Everything.
"Ibarra kissed you?"
Maggie shrugged. "Sort of. I mean, it was just a…."
"Peck on the cheek?" Brooke asked.
"Not exactly. But it didn't mean anything."
Brooke stood there holding the latte. The steam from it rose up all the way to her raised eyebrows.
Brooke gave the drink to her. "Do you want to talk about it?" she asked.
"No. It wasn't romantic. It was about how upset we both were about Lauren's murder." Maggie tried to convince herself that was true, and she almost succeeded.
"I'm sorry about Lauren," Brooke said. "I know she was your friend."
She sat down in a chair nearby and watched Maggie run her hands across the keys.
"Did she ever come in here?" Maggie asked, and Brooke shook her head. "No. I don't think so. If so, she was a plain coffee and out the door kind of customer. Not a regular. Did she like coffee?"
"I don't know," Maggie said, and at that the tears finally came. She hadn't cried for Lauren. Not when she went missing. Not when the body was found. Not at the police station, and not even last night when she'd lain with the dogs watching TV until late into the night to keep her mind from racing.
But now the tears came. A young woman, a stranger almost, was dead. More than dead. Murdered. For no reason. No reason Maggie could see, anyway.
But that was the problem, wasn't it? She couldn't see the reason because she knew nothing at all about Lauren. She knew she loved her dog, Hendrix. She knew she loved pearls and beads. She knew there was sadness in her past, reflected in the necklace that was still around her neck when she died. But that was it. Lauren had almost reached out to her, she was sure of it. But for some reason she'd held back. Could Maggie have saved her? Could she have somehow prevented whatever chain of events led to her death?
She talked it over with Brooke a bit. But there was nothing there. No clue. No insight. No special inside piece of information she could use to find a solution to the murder.
Without a solution the crime was an empty, pointless, ugly thing. A woman had died at far-too young an age. Twenty-five, she remembered Ibarra saying, and even that hurt, because she hadn't even known exactly how old Lauren was.
Her phone beeped and she checked for the text. Reese had sent a picture back, without a caption just like she had done. His was a selfie, him looking bored, sitting in a makeup chair while someone fussed at his hair.
She touched the picture with her finger, blowing it up. Up close, she could see the wrinkles around his incredible eyes, signs of mortality that might someday make his physical perfection fade away to a shadow of what it had been.
But not today. Today he was Movie Star Reese Stevens. Today he would be primped and polished and sent out like a prized show animal to strut his stuff on the stage.
She texted back a thumbs up to encourage him, longing for him to be here, back in her world, but not wanting to say so. For if she did, he would come back. He would drop everything and throw away the career he was hanging onto by a thread. And she didn't want that for him. Or, more accurately, she didn't want
to be the reason for that.
So she resolutely put her phone away and chatted with Brooke as she finished her latte.
When they finished their conversation, Brooke went back to work.
Maggie polished off the last swallow of her coffee. She stood up and gathered her things to leave.
The young woman who had been working on the sofa had also gotten up to leave. As she passed by the young man reading on his phone, she bent down. "You dropped your pen," she said, handing it to him.
He smiled at her, and said hello, and their hands lingered for just a moment as he took the pen from her.
She smiled back, then walked away, and he sat there as if thinking.
Then he jumped up and walked quickly to the door.
He met the girl there, as she was opening it. "I'm headed toward the park," he said. "You going that way?"
She nodded, and they left together.
Maggie went back across the street. But before she turned the sign on the door of Carita Bead Shop and started her work day, she pulled out her phone and called up the selfie Reese had sent her from so far away, and saved it to her favorite photos so she could look at it again.
Chapter Thirteen
That afternoon a young woman dressed all in black, from her sleek black bobbed hair to her Doc Martens Mary Janes, opened the door of the shop and came in.
"Abby!" Maggie said, thrilled to see her.
They hugged, and even Willow looked up from where she was examining her fingernails to offer a sullen hello.
"I haven't seen you in at least a week," Maggie said, inviting her over to the work table.
Abby bent down to pet Jasper, and then Hendrix allowed her to give him a pat, too. Then she straightened up. "Missed me?" she asked.
Maggie sat back down at the table and picked up her current project, a pendant she was making from a button enclosed in a seed-stitched frame. "Of course I missed you," she said. "I miss your cheerful personality." She winked at Abby, and the girl laughed.
Abby had never met a sarcastic comment she didn't love. Maggie had been the butt of her snide remarks many times, and knew the college kid thought her to be way too sweet and way too idealistic. Despite this, they got along really well, and Abby leaving the part-time clerk job at the shop had been a hard blow to take.
Maggie motioned to the chair next to her and Abby sat down.
Abby looked into the bead tray to see what Maggie was making. "Purple of course," she observed.
"Of course," Maggie said.
"Is that that lace stitch you learned last summer?"
"Yup," Maggie said. "So what bead projects are you working on?"
Abby had gotten into beadwork while working in the shop but, "I haven't had time to do anything this semester," she confessed.
"I suppose not," Maggie said. "You probably don't get as much time to play with crafts now that you're no longer working here."
"No, I have a full course load, and my internship with the newspaper is keeping me busy."
Abby was working part-time at the local paper, the Carita News Times Sentinel Bulletin. The paper was all that was left of the original four newspapers in Carita that had gone bankrupt one by one, leaving the Frankenstein monster of a paper remaining, with staff from all four original companies working side-by-side in a tiny office next door to the coffee house. The paper was known to everyone in town by its nickname, the NTSB.
"Have you told your parents about the job yet?" Maggie asked, and Abby shook her head. Her family still thought she was studying pre-med, but Abby was planning on switching her major to journalism, if she ever got the nerve to face her family about it.
Abby picked up the silver-toned clasp Maggie was going to use for the necklace, and she nervously fastened and unfastened it a few times. "If I can write a really good feature story, show my skill with true investigative journalism, it would help me get into a good graduate school. That would help my parents see this is a good thing."
She wasn't looking at Maggie.
But Maggie heard the faint query in her voice.
"Like a murder case?" she asked Abby, and the young woman turned an eager expression her way.
"Exactly like that," she said.
"Well, don't look at me," Maggie said. "I don't know a thing. I'm completely out of it."
"You're skipping stitches," Abby pointed out, and Maggie looked down at her hands.
She set down the project. "I'll have to undo the entire last row," she said. She looked up from the mess to Abby. "Look. I get it. You want some inside info that you can build a story around. But I don't have a single thing to tell you."
"You're a witness."
"No. Not really. I was there when… the body… was found." It was still hard to think of the woman she'd known as the body. She shivered.
"I understand," Abby said. "But I'm not writing a story about the case or anything like that. I want to talk about who Lauren was. I want people to know more about her and to feel for the loss. I want people to care about her and to understand what happened."
Maggie shook her head. "But I don't understand what happened. No one does."
"Except the killer," Abby pointed out. "And I want to explore that."
"But I can't help you with that."
"Well, okay," she said, clearly disappointed.
"I don't want to see Lauren's memory exploited, Abby. Even to help your career."
"I don't want to exploit her," Abby insisted. "But can I brainstorm with you a bit? Maybe just talk with you and see if you can help me figure out how to approach my story?"
"I suppose," Maggie agreed.
"See, the thing is, I met Lauren several times, here at the shop. But I feel like I hardly know who she was."
Maggie looked down at her pendant. "I feel the same way. She was a very private person."
"Exactly. And so I feel like I need to tell her story. Find a way to do more than a cold obituary."
Maggie shivered at the sound of that.
"I want to find some way of telling people why she was a special person. But I feel like I don't know quite where to start."
Maggie nodded. Her fingers clasped the pendant, and she saw that the mistakes she'd made in the pattern went back not just one row, but two. She had been distracted, and not really noticing what she was doing. She'd have to undo all the work she'd accomplished since she'd sat down.
She stood up. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm having a hard time with Lauren's death. So it's hard to talk about it. And I honestly don't know a thing about the crime itself."
Abby stood up, too. "You're not investigating?" She seemed surprised by that, and Maggie didn't blame her. She'd always gotten involved. Always wanted to seek out the truth of an unsolved crime. But not this time. She was taking the police warnings seriously—the last thing she wanted to do was ruin their case and see a killer go free.
She just stood there, and then, out of the blue, Abby gave her a hug. It was unusual for her. After they broke apart, Abby took a step back, embarrassed. "Sorry," she said. "I wish I could help you feel better."
Maggie nodded. This death was hitting her very hard. Maybe it was having Hendrix here, a constant reminder of the loss. Or maybe it was how young the victim was. But she wasn't able to brush it off. She explained all that to Abby, and the girl nodded. "I didn't even know her, but I feel the same way. I wish I could do something to help."
"If you write a tribute to Lauren that does her justice, that will make me feel better, I think," Maggie said. "That would be a wonderful legacy for her.
Abby nodded. "I'll do my best. I'm headed out to her cabin now to get some atmospheric details for the story."
"Did you get permission to do that?" Maggie asked. "It's a crime scene, and you probably should stay away."
"The police are gone. My boss said he got the okay for me to go there because they've already cleared the scene." She paused, then said, "I want to do this right. My boss assigned me to write the obituary, but it turned out
so cold. She was born on this date, she died on this date, she lived at X and worked at Y. It just feels like she deserves more than that. Her life had to have some purpose, didn't it? It all has to mean something, doesn't it?"
Maggie stared at Abby. The kid's dark eyes were sorrowful, no doubt reflecting the same look in Maggie's own eyes.
"Yes," Maggie said softly. That was it. That was the reason this was hitting her so hard. The pointlessness of it all. Had there been any meaning to Lauren's life? Any reason she had been here? Any reason she was gone? Was it all just random chance?
Abby said goodbye and turned to go, but Maggie stopped her. "Hey!"
Abby turned back. "Yes?"
"Mind if I come along?"
"I don't mind," Abby said. "But why do you want to?"
Maggie called the dogs to her and snapped on their leashes. "Because Lauren Douglas's life has to mean something. And I've got to figure out what that meaning is."
Maggie drove Abby out to the cabin in the woods. The dogs sat in the back.
She pulled the car to a stop in the gravel driveway and got out.
The scene had long since been cleared by the police, so there was no sign that anything had happened at the cabin. In the cold gray of a cloudy autumn afternoon, it was a bleak place, and the little gate to the yard swung in the wind, letting out eerie creaks that made Maggie think of desolate graveyards.
Jasper whined in a way that signaled he needed a potty break, so Maggie let the dogs out to run around. She put them in the yard, and then shut the creaking gate. "Stay here, boys," she told them, and they began to snuffle around, checking out the piles of leaves and the bushes that needed watering.
Abby had gotten out of the car at the same time Maggie had. She stood there, examining the scene with her best attempt at a reporter's dispassionate air. But Maggie could see the chill wash over Abby just as it had over herself.
After a minute, Abby walked over to the cabin and went up on the porch. She tried the door, but it was locked.
Then she peered in the window. She had her little reporter's notebook in hand, and she stopped periodically to scribble notes.
Maggie and the Whiskered Witness Page 8
