Perhaps she could help. Sam summoned up residual energy from her morning encounter with the wooden box but the initial burst of energy had dissipated. Odd. Just when she thought she’d pegged the results; normally she got about twelve hours of vigor after handling the box. Had she somehow given it away? All her friends had certainly moved at top speed this morning. Maybe Sam had transferred power to them in some way. She wandered into the kitchen, frustrated with the uselessness of dwelling on it.
Jerking open the first of the kitchen drawers she rummaged through mismatched flatware and utensils. The next contained two rolls of plastic wrap and a wadded paper napkin and seventeen twist ties. Sam berated herself for actually counting them. The third drawer was the junk drawer.
She scooped the contents onto the countertop and began to poke around. A scrap of paper, business card, old mail . . . she hoped to come up with something that might provide a connection to wherever the Adams’s went. Delbert Crow had told her that Cheryl Adams skipped around a lot. But the drawer yielded nothing.
Undeterred, Sam closed that one and started on another promising drawer, crammed full. Her mother used to comment on her tenacity—picking at a thread, she called it. As in, “Samantha, set that problem aside—you’re always pickin’ at a thread.”
But this drawer, too, contained only kitchen stuff, the detritus of old bottle caps and plastic devices that only the inventor of such could name—was it an egg separator or a measuring spoon? No one seemed to ever go through these little rat-stashes and throw out any of it.
Giving up on the kitchen, Sam went into the master bedroom where a dresser showed promise. The top two drawers were empty—at least the lady had taken her necessaries along with her. The next drawer contained a collection of t-shirts and pullover tops, most of which were worn so threadbare it was easy to see why they’d not made Cheryl’s cut in the choosing up of which clothes to take with her. Sam rummaged through them but found nothing other than the battered clothing.
She hit the jackpot with the bottom drawer, apparently the place of Cheryl’s filing system, such as it was. A couple of envelopes with Final Notice stamped in red lay on top of the hodgepodge. Both were still sealed, one from the electric co-op and the other from the mortgage company. Beneath those were other notices from the same, each with increasingly dire warnings about how they better get some money, and soon. Obviously, Cheryl Adams had gotten her fill of being chewed out in writing and simply chose to ignore everything after a certain point. Sam stacked the pages neatly and set them aside.
Below the nasty past-due notices were a collection of pay stubs, which Sam gathered, noting that the most recent was dated back in June. If Adams had been out of work that long, it certainly explained why she couldn’t pay her bills and why she felt compelled to walk out on her mortgage.
The rest of the drawer’s contents consisted of important things like a two-year-old
As she might have guessed, the early pages of the book were filled with the looping handwriting of a teen and the entries consisted of things like “School was a drag today” and “Had a huge fight with Sandy. I hate her!!!” After twenty pages or so, the rest were blank. As Sam started to drop the book back into the drawer a small bit of newspaper slipped out of the back of it. She picked it up.
A marriage notice: Cheryl Tercel wed to Dan Adams. No photo or real write-up, just the simple announcement that probably came from the county records of some unnamed place.
Sam picked up the other two clippings that had been among the assortment of papers. One was an article about Hudson County Rodeo and the naming of that year’s queen and princesses. One of the princesses in the court was a Sally Tercel. There was no Hudson County in New Mexico, so this came from somewhere else. The other clipping also contained the name Tercel in a story about a man killed in a car accident, just outside a town called Andersonville. Sam had no idea where any of these places were but maybe Beau could use the information to track down the Tercel family and somehow find out Cheryl’s current location. She added the newspaper bits to the stack with the past due bills and closed the drawer on the rest of the clutter.
Another thirty minutes poking about the many cubbyholes in the house but nowhere did Sam come across the name Bram Fenton nor any mention of a private investigator, outside of one Sue Grafton novel, coated in dust, under a living room end table.
Gathering the small stack of envelopes and clippings she’d found in the bedroom, Sam locked the place up again and headed out to her truck. She speed-dialed Beau’s cell phone and filled him in on the findings at the house.
“I can bring you the papers I collected, if you like.”
“Any chance I could take you to dinner tonight?”
The hope in his voice tore at her. She’d certainly been the neglectful one in the relationship in recent weeks. But exhaustion was quickly overtaking her.
“I’ve got an early morning tomorrow. First day for Sweet’s Sweets and all that.”
“How about I meet you at Michael’s Kitchen in fifteen minutes? Mama’s had her dinner already and she’ll be perfectly happy in front of the TV for an hour or so. You bring the papers and we’ll call it an early dinner.”
An image of the stuffed sopapillas at Michael’s came into her head and she could almost smell the green chile. Practically salivating, she agreed. Maybe it’s just what I need, she thought as she started her truck.
When Beau walked into the restaurant, two minutes behind her, she knew she’d made the right decision. He lit up when he saw her. When the model-handsome deputy sheriff first showed an interest in Sam she couldn’t understand the attraction on his part. Any woman under eighty would be drawn in by the ocean-blue eyes, the dark hair with touches of gray at the temples and the smile that tilted upward at one side. It had taken some sweet Southern talk for him to convince her that she—chubby, graying, and five years older than he—was attractive to him. Since they’d begun dating early this autumn she’d finally begun to believe his sincerity.
“Hey there,” he whispered as he leaned close to give her a kiss beside her left ear. He took a seat across from her and reached over to take her hand. “I’ve missed you.”
“We just had dinner the other night,” she reminded.
“It’s not the dining room where I’m missing you.” His eyebrows wiggled.
A young Hispanic waitress appeared and they placed orders without having to look at the menus.
“Busy week,” Sam said as the girl walked away. “But I can’t believe how much we’ve gotten done.” She told him how many friends had shown up this morning and how quickly the shop was shaping up.
“How is this being a retail baker going to affect your schedule?”
“Let’s just say that early dinners may become a way of life for awhile. I’ve hired an assistant who will work the sales counter, but most of the baking has to happen early in the mornings. If things go well, I’ll hire another baker—soon, I hope—and then I won’t have to put in the
He squeezed her hand again and let go as the waitress brought their glasses of iced tea.
“Oh, before I forget . . .” Sam rummaged in her pack and brought out the banded stack of papers she’d taken from Cheryl Adams’s house. “I don’t know if these small clues will help.”
“Anything’s better than nothing,” he said. “It could put us that much closer to finding her.”
Their plates arrived and a few minutes of silence passed as they cut into the steaming mixture of sopapilla, meat, beans, cheese and chile.
“How did anyone figure out that frying a little square of bread could turn out so delicious?” Sam mumbled through a bite.
Beau’s eyes actually rolled upward as he savored the heady blend of flavors.
“I have to stop to breathe,” Sam said, setting her fork down after a few minutes.
“I stopped by the office and read Fenton Bram’s autopsy report.” Beau had paused to take another sip of his tea. “The fatal wound wasn’t caused by his fall from the bridge. He had a nasty gash on the side of his neck that hit the carotid artery. He was bleeding heavily before he ever made the leap.”
“How could he . . .?”
“Get out to the middle of the bridge and jump off, when he was probably getting weaker by the second?”
She nodded.
“No idea. But the mystery gets deeper. I had them compare DNA in that trench coat with the vic’s DNA. It’s
