when I looked up he was looking back at me. The usual smile in his eyes was replaced by something else. What was it? Longing maybe. I pulled away and he returned to his usual self.
I pointed to the dog sweater he’d laid beside him as I went back to my snowflake. “We better get crocheting.” He nodded in agreement and picked up his hook.
“Too bad the detective hasn’t taken up crochet. It would do him good.” Mason worked a few stitches. “I suppose he doesn’t think it’s manly enough.” Mason paused a beat. “I’ve always thought real men don’t have to keep proving themselves.”
“Different strokes for different folks,” I said vaguely, not wanting to get sucked into their competition. I changed the subject and brought up Emily and the break-ins. Mason was always a good sounding board. This was the first chance I had to put together all the discordant pieces and try to make sense of them.
“If this kid wasn’t the one sneaking in your house, then who was?” Mason said. He seemed doubtful about someone going to so much trouble to find out the identity of an author.
“You don’t know how people are about the Anthony books. It would certainly take the thunder out of our launch party if somebody disclosed the real identity of A. J. Kowalski first,” I said.
The snowflake began to come together quite quickly, though the limp white stitches were hardly impressive looking. Starching them was what did the magic.
Mason asked the obvious question. Did I know the vampire author’s real identity? And I gave him the same answer I’d given everybody else. No. No matter what I’d seen with Adele, the jury was still out on whether it was William.
“Maybe you know, but you don’t know that you know,” Mason said, chuckling at his own tongue twister. He gestured toward the tote bag I’d been carrying back and forth. A file stuck out that had
I pulled it out and showed him. Everything was about our multicultural holiday party. “See, there’s nothing in here.”
He suggested maybe it was something I’d brought home a while ago. We looked over my desk and there was nothing there. I took him in the crochet room and I heard him chuckling behind me. “Someone ransacked this room, right?” He bent down and pulled a plastic grocery bag off his foot that had caught there. I explained I’d cleaned it up since then. This was normal.
“You’re into crochet now, so you should understand this is how we roll.” I picked up the bag, looked inside, and pulled out a half-finished pale green shrug made out of some bamboo mix yarn. I put it with the pile of need- to-be-finished items while I explained he could look at them two ways, either as UFOs—unfinished objects—or as WIPs—works-in-progress.
As we were leaving the room, Mason saw me glance out the window toward the Perkins’ house and asked what the latest was with my neighbor. I told Mason about Emily needing money, which didn’t surprise him. He was surprised when I mentioned her picking up the watch, particularly when he heard how she could have turned it into cash. I also mentioned the disappearing motorcycle. However I didn’t mention the situation with Mrs. Shedd’s money and the fragile financial state the bookstore was in, partly because I’d given Mrs. Shedd my word to keep it quiet and partly because it was too upsetting to think about.
“Maybe the watch has some kind of sentimental value. She wants it to remember Bradley by,” Mason said.
“I don’t buy that. I’ve been thinking about it all day. I remembered something Emily had said when she thought Bradley was just missing. He’d been upset with her about a lot of things and one of them was that she hadn’t picked up his watch. It’s some kind of James Bond Rolex. What if Bradley isn’t really dead and he wants his watch?”
I mentioned what the SEC guy had said about them being tipped off before Bradley disappeared. “Bradley must have known he was going to get caught.” I told Mason about the money left in the checking account and that was what made the SEC guy believe Bradley was dead. “He thought Bradley would have cleaned out everything if he was planning to disappear. But maybe he deliberately left the money in the account because he knew that was what it would look like.”
I thought back to how oddly Emily had acted the night I saw the disappearing motorcycle in her driveway. “And maybe Emily knows he’s not dead.”
Mason and I went back into the living room and started to brainstorm with the facts. We came up with scenarios that had Bradley dead or alive. The dead scenario had Bradley mailing the suicide note on the way to Long Beach, leaving his car in the terminal parking lot where it wouldn’t be noticed because people often left cars there for a number of days, then getting on the boat with his one-way ticket and, somewhere in the middle of the journey, leaving his cell phone and wallet on a seat before jumping off the boat.
We also came up with a faked-death scenario. In that one Bradley leaves his car but has some other mode of transportation. His Suburban was big enough to fit a motorcycle in the back. He gets on the boat with his one-way ticket. Somewhere during the trip, he leaves his wallet and cell phone on a bench. He gets off the boat in Catalina and then buys a ticket with cash and goes back to Long Beach. He takes the motorcycle and leaves the car. By the time Emily gets the suicide note, he’s long gone.
I mentioned my parking-ticket issue. It worked with the not-dead scenario. He would have used the parking ticket to get out of the lot when he left on the motorcycle. I brought up Emily viewing the tape and not seeing him disembarking. That was an easy obstacle to overcome. He could have disguised himself or she could be his accomplice and merely said she didn’t see him. Mason asked me if I’d been watching the tape.
“Yeah, but not that closely. I was looking for a guy in dress clothes. Suppose he brought along a change of clothes? If he put on jeans and a puffy jacket and a hat, I wouldn’t have recognized his form.
“This is what I love about you, Sunshine, never dull conversation.” He sat forward, his eyes bright as he considered what I’d said. “Emily could have been an accomplice from the start. All of her talk about not really knowing much about her husband’s business might be a cover-up.”
I was doubtful and he read my expression. “Or not.”
It was fun being able to shoot ideas back and forth with Mason. Whenever I tried with Barry, I got the same response. “Stay out of it.” He wasn’t even interested in conjecture. I told Mason that Emily had seemed too convincing in her reaction to Bradley being missing for it to be fake. “Her emotions seemed to be on a roller coaster. First she was worried, then angry. I think if it were an act, she would have stuck with worried.”
“But what if she didn’t know from the start, but found out later when he contacted her about the watch?” Mason offered.
I slumped back on the couch. “But would he take the chance of hanging around for a watch, even if it was a collector-quality Rolex?” I glanced in the direction of my neighbor’s house. “Do you think he’s there now?”
Mason grinned. “As your lawyer, I’m suggesting you don’t do anything illegal.”
“But as my friend?” I said, matching his grin.
“Probably the same,” he said, getting up. He put the dog sweater and yarn back in his bag. He’d done maybe two rows. At this rate, it wouldn’t be ready until summer. I walked him to the back door and was concerned to find it open. No break-ins this time, break-outs. The dogs had let themselves and the cats out. Cosmo and Blondie came in without problem. Cat Woman came in with the promise of some beef jerky, but Holstein was nowhere to be found.
I explained that we only let the cats out during the day and kept them in the yard. There were raccoons, skunks, rabbits and other critters in the yard at night that we worried the cats would mess with and be the worse for it. I heard a meow coming from somewhere.
“There he is,” Mason said, trying to reassure me.
“Yes, but where?” I said, turning around to see where the sound was coming from. Both Mason and I got it at the same time. It sounded like it was coming from the Perkins’ yard.
I was going to go alone, but Mason insisted on coming with. I thought if we stood on the bench near the fence to their yard, we might be able to see the cat and maybe get him to come to us. It was easy to forget Mason was in his fifties and a high-powered attorney when he got a Tom Sawyer kind of expression on his broad face. He pushed the lock of gray-flecked hair that had fallen across his forehead and seemed unconcerned that he was wearing wool slacks and a cashmere pullover. I led him to the white bench that was almost against the ivy-covered fence between our properties. He climbed on it first and gave me a hand. Neither of us saw the cat, but we did notice there was a low shed just on the other side of the fence.
