“Rena,” I said. “Hey. How are you?”
“Not good at all. We all read the paper this morning. Is there something you didn’t share with us? Did you know Mallory before?”
Edwin had called to send me his support. He’d told Tom not to worry, that he, I, and the shop were all going to be okay. I had the best job in the world, I’d been thinking on the bus ride over, anxious to disembark and get to work.
But amidst the morning traffic, the vehicles and the pedestrians on the sidewalk, I had a sense that we were being watched. It was probably unwarranted, but Bridget Carr had made me paranoid, Rena’s words just now even more so. As many times as I’d read the article, I hadn’t picked up on anything that sounded as if Mallory and I had known each other before Friday night.
“Can I buy you a coffee? Maybe a muffin?” I said as I started walking toward the bakery next to the bookshop.
“Uh…” she said as though she had more to say and my plans had interrupted hers. Nevertheless, she walked with me to the mostly empty bakery.
Once we were inside, I turned to her. “I didn’t know Mallory before. That article makes me look guilty, but I’m not. The police don’t think I am either.” I hoped, but I wasn’t so sure. “Have a seat, I’ll grab us some breakfast.”
I motioned to a small table in the corner and then walked up to the counter for coffee and muffins.
I hoped a small break would help Rena’s state of mind. Mine too.
“Delaney! Hello,” Bruno said. With his gruff voice and his wide chest and large arms, he was not what you might have expected to find behind the counter of a patisserie, but he was one good baker. “How’s the crew next door? I heard about the terrible … the tragedy over the weekend. I’m so sorry.”
I nodded, waiting for him to say something about the Renegade Scot article, but he didn’t. “We’ll be okay, but we’re sorry for the victim and her family.”
“Aye. Let me know if any of you need anything at all.”
“Thanks, Bruno.”
I wasn’t hungry and I’d had more than enough coffee, but I ordered coffees and muffins for Rena and me.
“I’m sorry about that article,” I said as I put the items on the table. “It happened mostly because I wouldn’t talk to the reporter. She’s a bulldog, which might be a good trait for a journalist, but to me she has teetered on the edge of unethical with that article. What she said happened didn’t happen exactly that way.” I sighed. “There was no way to talk this through without sounding defensive, but basically I told her that I didn’t want to talk to her.”
Rena ignored the muffin but took a shaky sip from the coffee. “You didn’t know her? Mallory?”
“No,” I said. “What made you think I might have?”
“It just … This article makes you sound so suspect. I wondered if you … I wondered if Sophie and I set her up by bringing her to the pub that night. You two acted like you didn’t know each other, but I wondered if we put her in harm’s way.”
I took a slow sip of coffee. There was something—or there were a number of somethings—wrong with what Rena had just said. Of course, I could’ve chalked it up to the trauma and tragedy that she’d been through, but something told me that wasn’t it.
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
I was glad for the bookish voice’s words. They’d come from poetry this time. T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—a poem, oddly for the moment, about seduction and intellectualism, though I interpreted the words I’d heard to mean something about creating an illusion for the world to see. What illusion was Rena working on?
“I didn’t know Mallory,” I said. “Why would it matter anyway? What are you afraid she told me, Rena?”
She blinked and then moved her shaking hands under the table to her lap.
“Okay,” I said. I took another sip of my coffee, stalling.
“Nothing,” she said a long moment later. “It’s not that, Delaney. It’s just that a fellow student was killed and the reporter talked to you.”
“Just because I was there, Rena. I was looking in the window—not like Ms. Carr made it sound, but, nevertheless, I was there. I didn’t tell her anything because I didn’t know anything.”
Rena looked around. There was no one sitting near us, but she slunk in her chair.
“Do you feel threatened?” I asked.
“Yes. I mean, not really … I’m just upset. When I read this article, I felt like you didn’t tell me something. Like Mallory didn’t tell me something. I guess I just wanted to know what I was missing.”
I nodded, feeling the same way she said she did. “Did you tell the police everything?”
“Yes.”
“What time did you tell them you got home?”
“Right after Sophie. I told you that already.”
“But you left again. Where did you go?”
She didn’t know how I knew, but she wasn’t going to back away. “None of your business.”
“It’s the police’s business. I hope you told them.”
She shrugged. She wasn’t going to tell me one way or the other. However, she was correct—it was not my business. I could only hope that me knowing she had left was enough to make her worried I’d tell the police before she did.
I shook my head. “Look, I’m … I just want the killer found too.”
“The police are doing their jobs, surely,” she said quietly.
“It’s been my experience that everyone has so many secrets that the police aren’t ever really able to do their jobs thoroughly. I hope you did tell them what you were doing Friday night after the pub.”
She looked at her coffee cup on the table in front of her.
“Rena, has Dr. Eban ever asked anyone to do anything … do something to get a
