“Yes.”
Annabelle and Dylan both stared at the small blonde. “What?” they asked, simultaneously.
“Yes,” she repeated, her voice dry but urgent. “I think I know what it was.”
“Are - are you serious?” Annabelle asked, her heart suddenly racing.
“Yes,” she nodded, becoming excited now. “Because he gave me something and told me to hide it and, well, not show it to anyone or tell anyone about it. But, now…” She paused, fidgeting. “Well, he’s dead, and I just know in my heart that I’m supposed to give it to you.” She attempted a smile. It lit up her face.
“You know, in your heart?” Annabelle asked, feeling stupid immediately upon asking the question.
“Yep,” Ginnie said, nodding. “Actually, when you called, I knew it. I get feelings sometimes. And I’m never wrong.” She smiled brightly now; telling them about her superpower made her happy. “Actually, I sense I’m not the only one at this table who gets them sometimes.” She turned her gaze on Annabelle and narrowed it.
Dylan looked from her to Annabelle and back again. He blinked at her and then looked down at the table again and cleared his throat.
The sound seemed to pull Ginnie back to the bleak subject at hand. She straightened and forced her face into a more serious expression. “Tell you what,” she said, leaning forward. “Come see me after the lunch hour and I’ll tell you where it is. I hid it, like he asked. But I can give you a map.” She pushed her chair back and stood up. Annabelle and Dylan followed suit.
“I close down for an hour from twelve to one.” She looked down at her little silver watch. “So, two hours? Come back then?”
Annabelle nodded as they made their way to the door to the office and Ginnie opened it for them, leading the way back out into the store and toward the winding staircase.
“My apartment’s not too far from here. Just a ten minute walk or so. I go home for lunch every day. I love to cook,” she explained, talking to them over her shoulder as they descended the stairs. “In fact, I almost couldn’t decide between opening my own restaurant and opening a bookstore.”
“What happened to the medical stuff?” Annabelle asked, wondering why she’d gone to Columbia if she was going to become a small business owner.
“I had to read so many sucky books in school and eat so many buckets of take-out, it just proved to me that it must not be my thing,” she explained, coming to the first floor and turning to face them as they stepped down. “Craig was always telling me as much. All of those Kung-Pao Chickens and medical journals...” She shook her head and grimaced. They came to the base of the stairs and made their way down one of the stacks of books to the main entrance of the store. “I yearned for real food and real books. So, it was one or the other. Books won out.” She gestured to the store around her.
Annabelle smiled back at her. “Ginnie, thank you for helping us with this.”
“It’s my pleasure.” She turned to Dylan. “I only hope that you can use what I give you to get to the bottom of this.”
Dylan and Annabelle nodded one last time and then left the store.
Across the street, a blue-eyed man in black leather watched a strawberry-blonde woman and a tall, lanky teenager with curly brown hair step out onto the sidewalk. Jack finished his coffee, stood, and tossed the paper cup into the trash can several feet away, never taking his eyes off of the couple across the street. When he walked through the door of the Starbucks, several college-aged women watched him leave.
Jack hailed a taxi and motioned to Annabelle and Dylan, who caught sight of him and crossed the street.
“How’d it go?” he asked as they ducked into the back of the cab.
“You won’t believe me when I tell you,” Annabelle answered. “But, we can’t go far because we have to be back in two hours.”
“Why’s that?”
“Craig Brandt gave his girlfriend something important to hide before he died. And she’s going to give it to us.”
As they rode south toward a small bakery where they hoped to get more coffee and an early lunch, Annabelle pulled her hair tie out and ran her hand through her long locks, freeing them from the braid. Her hair hadn’t had a chance to completely dry that morning and Annabelle always liked how soft it was when it dried in the sun.
Plus, it gave her something to play with while she mulled things over.
There was a lot to mull over. She stole a glance up at Jack, who sat in the front seat with the taxi driver. As if sensing her eyes on him, he cocked his head to one side, turning slightly in her direction. She hurriedly looked away.
All morning, they’d managed to put their own personal issues on a back burner so that they could deal with the more pressing matters of Craig Brandt and the Andersons’ murderers. However, she knew good and well that she had not been the only one suffering for it. Her blood pressure must be through the roof. She had so many things she wanted to say to Jack – so many things she wanted to ask him – that she could scarcely keep her mind on what she was doing or saying at any given point in time.
Luckily, Virginia Meredith had been an interesting enough character that it had helped to focus Annabelle on the matters at hand. Meredith hadn’t been anything like what Annabelle expected. The voice on the other end of the phone conversation had been the same, but she’d expected a past medical student to be more… stodgy. Uptight.
But Annabelle could already see what Brandt would find attractive in Ginnie. Meredith was like a ray of sunshine on a rainy day. Like that Indian Summer in a land where winter was a dreaded, white death.
And she was
Annabelle smiled to herself at that thought. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in such things, per se, it was just that they’d never played a central role in her own philosophy. Still, if Meredith said she was psychic, than who was Annabelle to tell her she was wrong?
Now she frowned as she found herself wondering what it might have been that Brandt left behind with the petite blonde. What would a twenty-something year-old med student think was so important, and so
And once she asked herself that question, Annabelle realized, with some trepidation, that whatever it was, it was about to become
Virginia Meredith turned her key in the gold knob and pushed open the door of her apartment. She crossed the threshold, adjusting her purse on her shoulder, and then paused. She lifted her chin, as if scenting the air for something. And then she frowned, blinked, and came the rest of the way in, closing the door behind her.
With the practiced aim of one who had done so a thousand times, she threw her purse onto the couch across the room, where it landed, face-up, against the throw pillows. Then she moved into the adjoining kitchen, and, once there, she stopped and looked around her, as if suddenly not understanding where she was.
Lemon gnocchi with spinach and peas. That’s what she had wanted for lunch today. She’d been craving it from the moment she’d woken up until she’d gotten the phone call from Annabelle Drake. Since that time, however, all she’d been able to think about was Craig. And the thing he’d given to her to hide.
Six years.
Virginia turned around and left the kitchen, making her way to the couch as if she were a zombie. She sat down and gazed toward the window, not really looking out through it so much as looking
So much had happened in the six years since Craig’s death. Before he died, they’d actually talked about getting married. Having kids. They both wanted tons of them. Virginia always talked about how she would cook gourmet meals for them to put in their lunches. How they would read to them. She and Craig both loved books. Different kinds, but books, nonetheless.
