CHAPTER 5
“MOTHER, TELL ME THAT’S NOT YOU.” IT WAS MY son Peter calling my cell phone. Peter was a William Morris television agent who took his image very seriously and got upset when anyone in the family, which basically meant me and his younger brother Samuel, did anything he thought reflected poorly on him. He claimed he’d had the TV in his office on mute and by the time he turned it up, the story was over.
If you’re watching Channel 3, it is,” I said, relieved he had the sound off and had missed the “crime scene groupie” comment. It was ridiculous to have that label just because I happened to show up at a few crime scenes in the past. By now I’d walked down the street to the bookstore parking lot and gotten in my car.
“Mother,” he said, stretching it out to two syllables of disapproval. I explained what had happened and assured him I was fine, even if I was still feeling a little fuzzy headed over it all.
He gave me a minilecture about “that’s what happens when you start dating cops.” Peter wasn’t happy about Barry and used any opportunity to try to knock him out of the picture. At first, I thought it was the idea of my dating that bothered him, but when he tried to fix me up with Mason Fields, a lawyer he was working with on a reality show, I began to think it was more about who.
“Mother, you’re not a suspect, are you?”
Finally something I could answer in a way that would make him happy. “Of course not,” I said, trying to sound peppier than I felt. The whole experience was finally getting to me.
“Maybe you should talk it over with Mason. Just in case,” Peter said. Mason and I had a little flirting thing going, and I did like him. He had a sense of humor about being a lawyer, he was fun and he seemed to like me. But I wasn’t quite up to juggling men, and so far I hadn’t taken him up on his offers of dinner. I told Peter I’d keep it in mind and clicked off.
Then I called Dinah’s cell to see what had happened to her. I got her voice mail and left a message to call me ASAP. It was about then that it struck me: I’d gotten in my car as if I were going to go somewhere, but I was on my way to work and the bookstore was in front of me. Chalk it up to being unnerved by the morning’s occurrence.
Adele called in to say she had to go home and change since her clothes had gotten messed up when she was working on Drew. When she finally came in, she spent most of the day in the bookstore’s cafe telling everyone how she’d tried to save Drew Brooks. I was glad she wasn’t wearing Gloria Hearston’s hat.
Luckily it was a slow day because I was definitely not my usual self. I’d be okay for a few minutes, but then I’d get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach as I relived walking into Drew’s office and seeing him. Along with the eerie flashbacks, one thought kept surfacing: What had really happened?
I left Shedd & Royal in the late afternoon and drove home, still not having heard from Dinah. By some quirk of timing Barry and I arrived at my driveway at the same time. He pulled his Tahoe in behind the greenmobile. The sun was fading, turning the sky a soft apricot as we walked into my yard together. For once I didn’t care that Barry had just dropped over.
“Are you okay?” he asked, putting his arm around my shoulders.
“I’ve had better days.” It felt nice to have some support, and if anybody could understand how I felt it was Barry. He dealt with crime scenes all the time.
“You couldn’t get your mind off seeing Brooks, right?” When I nodded, Barry squeezed my shoulders. “The best thing you can do is concentrate on something else.” He glanced around the yard. “Think about how beautiful those flowers are,” he said, pointing at the orange and yellow pansies filling the planters that ran along the patio. “Think about your friends, your crochet stuff—me,” he said, as his lips curved into a grin.
“Actually there was something I kept thinking about,” I said. His expression warmed—he obviously assumed it had to do with him. It did, just not the way he thought. “I bet you know all kinds of inside information about what happened to Drew Brooks,” I said.
“You call that thinking about something else?” He shook his head with dismay. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you just liked me for my information,” he teased, putting the bag of dog toys down on the patio table. I suspected he had just picked them up on his way here as opposed to having purchased them this morning, when he’d mentioned needing to drop them off.
“I just wondered what happened after I left. Well, you left, too, but you must have found out how Drew Brooks died and who Detective Heather thinks did it.” I opened the kitchen door, and Cosmo ran out the door and tried to decide who to greet first. Clearly the dog knew which side his toast was buttered on because he rushed up to me, putting his floppy paws on my knees.
Barry appeared hurt. “Have you forgotten who your daddy is?” he said, holding up a rawhide chew. Cosmo was a regular dog diplomat. After a quick hello lick to me, he ran over to Barry and grabbed the chew. Blondie came out to see what was going on. Barry offered her a chew and she snatched it and ran back into the house.
Before we went inside Morgan drifted into the kitchen, Barry did a double take, then his expression dropped.
“How long is Princess Sad Face staying?” he said in a low voice.
He was right about the sad face part. Morgan always seemed to have a certain melancholy air about her. Today she was dressed in pink tights and leotard with a sweatshirt tied around her waist. When I did that it was to keep a sweatshirt handy. Morgan told me she did it to camouflage her hips—if you could call those tiny things hips. She went to dance class every day and worked at a kid’s gym and at an after-school program. Also, she went to auditions for music videos and stage productions. She had one coming up in the next couple of days.
“Just for a couple of weeks,” I said, watching her open the refrigerator and take out three slices of apple on a plate and a bottle of sparkling spring water.
Barry didn’t seem happy with the information. Her presence was a definite obstacle to his plans to show up spontaneously on my doorstep and then morph it into a whole other kind of encounter.
“What happened to that whole thing about your freedom and wanting to live alone and have ice cream for dinner if you wanted?” he asked.
“I still can, as long as I don’t make her eat any,” I said. “So, are you going to tell me about Drew Brooks, or not?”
“Not. I don’t know anything. It’s not my case, remember?”
“But you do know how he died—he drowned in the soup, didn’t he?” I mentioned seeing the blood on the back of his head. “I bet somebody hit him on the head and he fell in the soup.”
“I’m not talking, and besides, until there’s an autopsy nobody knows for sure.”
“Okay, then, if it was your case, who would you investigate first?”
Barry groaned and shook his head. “Hey, Sherlock, I see where you’re going and keep out of it. Have you ever heard the term
“I was just curious, that’s all.”
He rolled his eyes in response and carried the dog things inside.
THE NEXT MORNING WHEN I WENT INTO THE bookstore office I was surprised to find Mrs. Shedd sitting at her desk. Our paths crossed only occasionally since she mostly came in before the bookstore opened or after it closed. She was in her late sixties, but her blond hair, cut to frame her face and strategically cover certain spots, made her look at least twenty years younger. The actual color was chemically enhanced, but the thick, shiny texture was all good genes.
Everyone called her Mrs. Shedd. I only recently found out her first name was Pamela. I had never met Mr. Royal. Whenever she mentioned him, Mrs. Shedd gave the impression that he was on an extended trip. It was obvious he was her silent partner—very silent, like dead or nonexistent.
A mug of coffee sat next to her along with a little pile of cherry-almond cookies. The newspaper was open on the desk. Even upside down, I could tell what article she was reading. It was the same one I’d already read about the Drew episode. Since it was a local murder, it was a big story on the third page. The article mostly described what I’d seen first-hand. The cause of death was still unknown pending the autopsy results, but the police were still investigating. There wasn’t a lot of personal information about Drew other than that he was divorced with no children. What a surprise.
There was an accompanying picture that showed the crowd corralled in the parking lot, waiting to be
