Meg turned to her and shook her head. “No.”
“I figured as much.”
Meg furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”
Kristina looked away, shifty again. “Do you smoke?”
“Nah. It’s not my thing.”
Kristina whispered to her. “Well, you should pretend you do, for a moment at least.”
Meg wasn’t sure why Kristina looked so paranoid, but she decided to play along. She approached Kristina.
“All right.”
Kristina reached into her purse, pulled out another cigarette, lit it up, and handed it to Meg.
“What’s with this smoking ruse?” Meg asked.
“Look, act natural. Take a puff. And give me a laugh,” Kristina ordered.
Meg looked confused. “Why?”
“I don’t know who is watching, but I know they won’t suspect anything if they think we’re joking around.”
Meg gave Kristina a fake laugh, then asked for answers.
“Will you tell me what’s going on?”
“Did Cox tell you about the Trim Metrics story Paige was working on?” Kristina asked.
Meg shook her head, deep in thought. “No. I asked him if she had been working on a story about that. He said she was working on a story about the California drought.”
Kristina laughed. “Keep laughing.”
Meg complied and laughed out loud.
Kristina continued. “That’s a sack of lies. Paige wrote this big expose about Trim Metrics and how not only did their pills not work but that they caused some awful side effects.”
“Like what?”
“Brain aneurysms, heart attacks, some really awful stuff.”
Meg’s jaw nearly dropped.
“Keep laughing,” Kristina reminded her.
Meg forced a smile again. “Why would Grant lie and tell me he didn’t know anything about Trim Metrics?”
“Because, Zorkin Conglomerate International, the company that owns Trim Metrics, also owns this paper,” Kristina revealed.
It was all starting to come together now.
Kristina continued. “Cox put a kibosh on the story and reassigned her to some puff piece. Paige fought him on it. She said this story was too big to ignore, too dangerous not to expose. She threatened to blow the whistle and take the story elsewhere.”
“Then what happened?”
“Cox had a threat of his own. Either Paige dropped the story, or she’d be fired. Even more, Cox told her he’d ruin her reputation. Told her she’d never work in this town again. The next day, we all got word that she’d killed herself.”
“That’s a pretty crazy coincidence, don’t you think?”
“I sure do.”
“How do you know all this?” Meg asked.
“It’s amazing the things I hear from my desk. Speaking of, I should get back there before my boss gets suspicious.”
“Wait. This story Paige was writing, I don’t suppose there’s a copy of it floating around somewhere, is there?”
“Are you kidding? Why do you think they cleaned out Paige’s desk and wiped her computer so quickly? Anyway, it doesn’t change what happened to Paige, but at least now, maybe you have a better idea of the kind of thing that goes on around here,” Kristina said.
“I certainly do. Thanks, Kristina,” Meg replied.
“Be careful what questions you ask from now on. The answers might scare you.”
Chapter Thirteen
After what Kristina told Meg outside the newspaper’s offices, Meg was on high alert. Just as she suspected, there was more to this story than there first appeared to be. The timing of Paige’s death coming so shortly after getting into a spat with her boss over a Trim Metrics story was very peculiar. That wasn’t the only odd timing. Meg’s mind drifted to the funeral, where Paige’s ex-boyfriend, Isaac Reed, showed up unexpectedly and watched the proceedings from afar. That begged a follow-up.
Meg ducked into the ladies room of a neighboring coffee shop and cast a locator spell on Isaac Reed. Luckily, his apartment was only a few miles away. Then again, in L.A. traffic, that could take forty-five minutes to get to. Enchanted Bay’s quiet streets never looked so good.
Before Meg had the chance to head over to Isaac’s, she got an unexpected phone call from Hillary Martin. Paige’s mother said she wanted to meet up for a meal. Meg couldn’t turn her down, certainly not after hearing the anguish in her voice.
Besides, it would be nice to take a break from her investigation. Sometimes, a little distance went a long way to bring clarity to a situation. The one thing Meg had to be careful about was revealing that she was snooping around. She had no intention of concerning her friend’s mother until she had a reason to. The last thing she wanted was to get Hillary worked up about her daughter’s death being murder instead of suicide—at least until Meg had evidence.
Meg met Hillary at a nearby café and ordered some appetizers. Despite being the one to call Meg, Hillary was very quiet.
“Ms. Martin, are you sure there isn’t anything I can do for you?” Meg asked.
“You just being here is enough. By the way, I’m sorry for calling you on such short notice. I know you’re a busy woman.”
“You have nothing to apologize for. If there’s anything you need, you just let me know. I’m here for you.”
Hillary managed a smile. “Thank you. I didn’t know when you were headed back home. I just wanted to make sure I saw you one last time before you left.”
Meg knew there was more going on than that. What she couldn’t tell was if it was just Hillary mourning the loss of her daughter, or if something else was going on. One thing was for sure; Hillary looked completely rattled, even more so than the last time they spoke.
“Ms. Martin, if there’s something you need to get off your chest, you know you can tell me anything.”
“Sorry. I just had a weird conversation with Paige’s boyfriend.”
“What was so weird about it?”
“Tyler’s just been acting very strange since Paige’s death. I know we’re all in shock, but he just has the oddest way of showing it,” Hillary explained.
“What did he do?” Meg asked.
“It’s more what he hasn’t done, which is show any kind of remorse. It’s like he’s turned into a robot or something. It’s really unlike him. Not to mention unhealthy. You can only bottle up your emotions for so long. In the end, they always come out.”
While Hillary was perplexed by Tyler Watson’s apathetic state of mind, Meg was curious about something else.
“Did he come over to look for that keepsake he was talking about earlier?”
Hillary nodded. “Yeah. I don’t know why he cares so much about getting it back. Technically, it belongs to Paige. He gave it to her.”
“I’m sorry he’s behaving so strangely. Did he happen to find the keepsake?”
“He did. But do you know what the crazy part is? It just looked like some average department store gold necklace, not the family heirloom he’d described it as.”
Meg wrinkled her nose. “That is strange.”
“Enough about my day. How are you holding up?”
“What can I say? I’m still having trouble making sense of it all,” Meg replied.
Hillary sighed. “Tell me about it.”
Meg and Hillary talked for a little bit longer, reminiscing about the good times with Paige, remembering what a kind and generous person she was. Hillary and Meg then said a tearful goodbye and parted ways, Hillary thinking it would be the last time she’d see Meg for a while. Meg knew better. Even more, she now had an additional reason to talk with Tyler Watson again.
Chapter Fourteen
Before Meg approached Tyler, she had someone else to check in on first. When Hillary Martin left the café, Meg ducked into the restroom and cast her locator spell again, making sure Paige’s ex-boyfriend, Isaac Reed, was still in the same place he was an hour before. Luckily, he was. It was time to pay him a visit.
> Isaac Reed was renting a first story apartment in a gated complex off Beverly Boulevard. Meg hated gated complexes. She knew Isaac wouldn’t buzz her in. That usually meant Meg would have to cast a spell in broad daylight to open the gate.
That afternoon, she got lucky. Just as she walked up to the gate, a long-haired, pizza delivery dude was getting buzzed into the building. The delivery guy had no problem holding the door open for her.
That was one hurdle down. The real problem was yet to come. She hated questioning people at their homes. It gave the suspects all the more incentive to slam the door in her face. Even more importantly, it made it hard to go with her favored ‘take-no-prisoners’ approach. Instead, she was forced into a soft glove approach that often led nowhere. That’s where she found herself now.
Meg wondered if Isaac would even answer the door. Thankfully, he did, although it took a few knocks. He opened it a crack, peering at Meg.
Meg looked at his short brown hair and eyes in his angular face and was immediately reminded of the actor from the series of potato chip commercials that he closely resembled.
“I’m not interested in saving the whales or contributing to whatever environmental action fund you’re working for,” Isaac said.
This had started off on an even worse foot than she thought. She’d have to work fast.
“I’m not here on behalf of the environment,” Meg replied.
“Let me guess; Jehovah’s Witness?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I’m here about Paige Martin.”
Suddenly, Isaac’s face went white. He stammered as he replied. “Who are you?”
“I’m Meg Walton, one of Paige’s best friends from Enchanted Bay.”
He nodded. “Yeah, she told me about you. What are you doing here?”
Meg had to use her words wisely. She wanted to just go right at him, but as it was, he’d only cracked his door slightly, and still looked wary as could be.
“I just wanted to see how you were doing,” she said.
He seemed completely blindsided by that comment. “Me?”
“Yeah. I saw you at the funeral.”
Isaac jumped on the defensive. “Hey, Tyler started that argument with me.”
She had to get him to calm down. In her mind, there was only one way to do that. “I’m not here on behalf of Tyler.”
He calmed down slightly, but still looked spooked. “You’re not?”
She shook her head. “I’m here on behalf of Paige. I’ve been trying to piece together what happened.”
“You heard what happened. She killed herself.”
“I meant, how she could have done it? She wasn’t the type.”
“You should be talking to Tyler about this.”
“Because he was her boyfriend?” Meg asked.
Isaac corrected her. “Because he was the cause of her depression.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s not a good dude. The man didn’t treat her right.”
“Do you know this for a fact?”
“Sometimes, you can just tell.”
“What were you two arguing about at the funeral?” Meg asked.
“He told me to beat it. I told him I had just as much right to be there as he did. Then, he threatened to have it out with me right then and there if I didn’t leave. Paige deserved better than a fight at her funeral, so I left,” Isaac said.
“What were you doing there in the first place?”
“The same thing everyone else was, paying my respects. Even though we weren’t together anymore, she was still a good person, and it was sad to see her go.”
“Speaking of, why did you two break up?”
Meg already knew the answer, but Isaac didn’t know that. She wanted to see if he was willing to be a hundred percent truthful.
“You know what they say; timing is everything in life. With her hectic job at the paper, and my hectic job at the movie studio, we couldn’t spend the kind of time together to make the relationship work,” Isaac said.
Just as Meg suspected, Isaac told a whopper of a lie. A year earlier, Paige had told Meg the truth that Isaac had cheated on her with a makeup artist at the movie studio he worked at. If Isaac was willing to lie about this, what else would he lie about?
Meg wanted to find out. “Did you talk to Paige the day she died?”
He tensed up. “No.”
Meg kept pressing. “The day before?”
“I hadn’t talked to her for weeks.”
“What was your last conversation about?”
Isaac stiffened up again. “Her boyfriend.”
“She talked to you about Tyler?”
He nodded.
Meg furrowed her brow. “Why would she talk to her ex about her current boyfriend?”
“We ran into each other at our old favorite restaurant, Antonio’s. She looked so sad. Paige told me she was going to dump Tyler. We started reminiscing about old times. It seemed like we might end up getting back together.”
“Did you?”
He shook his head. “She said there was too much going on right now and that she needed to sort things out in her life before she could go any further. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to do that, clearly.”
While Isaac was bemoaning Paige’s death, Meg latched on to a different line of thought.
“Why was she going to dump Tyler?”
“She found out he was cheating on her with his ex.”
“Seriously?” Meg asked.
Isaac nodded. That was a bombshell. The question became, was it another lie, or the truth this time? Isaac had no intention of clearing up the matter. He got surprisingly emotional and tried to make a hasty exit from the conversation.
“The fact is, with her gone, none of this matters now anyway. And talking about it makes me emotional. Besides, I need to be going anyway. Goodbye.”
Meg tried to get another word in. “But--”
Isaac wouldn’t let her get the rest of her sentence out. He closed the door on her in a hurry.
That left Meg with a series of unanswered questions and a very confused mental state. She couldn’t get over the fact that Isaac had gone from stiff to wildly emotional in a split second. Also, given the whopper of a lie he’d told about why he and Paige had broken up, it was difficult to completely believe everything he said about Tyler.
Of course, there was one way to try and verify it all, by paying Tyler a visit.
Chapter Fifteen
When Meg returned to her car, she closed her eyes and cast another locator spell, this time on Tyler Watson. Surprisingly, the spell pinned his location to Colgate Avenue. That was interesting to Meg, as she knew he lived on Hauser Road. The question became, who was he visiting?
There was a chance he was just hanging out with some of his male friends, but when Meg pulled up in front of the building and saw a familiar car, she realized that wasn’t the case. Meg had seen that lime green sedan earlier in front of Paige’s apartment building, being driven by none other than Tyler’s ex-girlfriend, Phoebe Cooper.
Seeing the car again and knowing Tyler was inside aroused all kinds of suspicion in Meg’s mind. Things were starting to come together. Maybe Isaac Reed’s accusation about Tyler wasn’t a lie. Perhaps Tyler was apathetic about Paige’s death because the woman he really cared about was Phoebe.
Meg had to take a moment and calm herself down before approaching the door to Phoebe’s townhome. Now was the time for a level head, even if Meg felt like she could explode at any moment. She also had to be careful. Questioning two suspects at once was a worst case scenario. They could easily team up against her, colluding their stories to hide the truth.
Still, Meg had to do everything she could. She took a few deep breaths, then opened her car door to approach Phoebe’s place. That’s when her plan got thrown for a loop. Just as Meg was about to step out of her car, Phoebe’s front door opened, and Tyler exited.
He headed immediately to his car in the driveway. Meg closed her car door across the street to not be spotted, but there was little chance of that anyway, given how focused Tyler seemed to be on getting into his car.
Phoebe emerged in the doorway of her townhome and said a few words to Tyler, which he promptly ignored. Unfortunately, Meg was too far away to hear exactly what had been said. From there, Tyler drove away, while Phoebe lowered her head and went back inside. That left Meg with a decision to make. She could either confront Phoebe or follow Tyler. Judging by the forlorn look on Phoebe’s face, she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Given that, Meg decided to tail Tyler’s car.
***
Ten blocks and half an hour of L.A. traffic later, Tyler arrived back at the parking lot to his single-story apartment complex off Melrose Boulevard. Meg knew she’d have to act fast. She didn’t want to let Tyler get back inside his apartment.
She pulled her car up right beside Tyler’s and jumped out.
“Tyler, just the man I’ve been wanting to talk to,” Meg said.
Tyler turned, saw Meg, and almost did a double take.
“Meg, what are you doing here? How do you even know where I live?”
“I looked it up, but that’s not important anyway. I have a couple of questions I have to ask you,” she said.
“I’m not in the mood.”
“What’s the matter? Rough night at your girlfriend’s place?”
Tyler stopped and tried to put on a confused look, but Meg saw the underlying annoyance in his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He’d managed to squirm out of truthfully answering questions before.
Meg was determined not to let him get away with it now. “Are you saying Phoebe isn’t your girlfriend?”
He tried to shut her down, then walked towards his doorstep. “That’s none of your business.”
“How about this? Did you have a big, blowup fight with Paige the night she killed herself?”
That stopped Tyler cold. He spun around, indignant. “Where are you getting all this from?”
Witch Cozy Mystery Nine Book Set Page 21
