2 On the Nickel (14 page)

Chapter 9

“Evan isn’t here today,” the perky blonde said. I leaned
forward to read her Mountaintop Gym name tag. Like the other the well-sculpted
trainers at the gym, twenty-something Gen could easily drop to the floor and
riff fifty pushups without breaking a sweat or a nail. She glowed with health
and brimmed with good cheer.

“He’s not?” I peered into the
gym. Saturday midmorning usually was the time people like me showed up. The fitness junkies cruised through the place before eight. Usually. Today the median age appeared to be much younger, and fitter than me.

Not one of them was sweating
profusely or complaining. Drat.

“The poor guy.” Gen’s radiant
smile dimmed a bit. “Death in the family.”

I frowned. “I heard, but Evan
didn’t mention rescheduling when I saw him at dinner last night. Why didn’t someone from the gym notify me? I wasted a trip up here.”

Gen jabbed both thumbs toward her
perky chest. “Because I’m taking Evan’s client list today. Let’s get started.”

“Oh.” I wasn’t keen on having a
kid like Gen tell me what to do. That’s why Evan Hodges was my personal
trainer.

With my sloppy gray sweats and my
ratty workout shirt, I looked like a beached whale standing next to sleek,
dolphin-like Gen. I wasn’t tanned. I wasn’t buff. And I certainly wasn’t fit.
Although I was trying.

I’m sure Gen had a different
definition than Evan of trying. Machines whirred, rock music blasted, and I
dithered. I could go home and bypass certain humiliation. Or I could tough it
out. I should have developed some level of fitness by now.

I should have called the gym
first. Funny how clear that was now. But I’d been focused on talking to Evan
about his mother, hoping he knew the underlying cause of the feud. I’d been
focused on my family, not his. At least my mother was still alive.

Gen bounced over to the tall metal file cabinet. There was a spring to her step that came from being new to adulthood. I told
myself I wasn’t envious of her youthful vitality. I didn’t want to reclaim my
childhood. That’s not why I worked out. I worked out so that I could be strong
and flexible.

The trainer pulled my chart and
studied it briefly. I had the sick feeling she was laughing to herself over my
lack of progress. “Do you need any help warming up?” she asked as a cute guy
strolled in.

“I can manage,” I said.

Gen dropped me like a steaming sauna towel and bounced back to the front desk. I went through my stretching
routine, then hit the treadmill for half an hour. I could have walked a couple
of hours on that thing if it had gotten me out of my fitness appointment with Gen.

I’d forgotten my headphones again,
and there wasn’t much point in watching TV without them. Instead, I listened to
the whir of well-oiled machines and the sounds of people using them. I tried
reading the lips of the television actors, but no one said, “I love you” or “Hi,
Mom.”

Before long, Mama’s near-arrest
hijacked my thoughts. Mama had insisted she didn’t kill anyone, but it sure
looked like her car killed Erica. Britt believed Mama had murdered Erica. I
believed Erica’s death could have been an accident. But Britt said Erica had
been run over multiple times—

This circular thinking wasn’t
helping.

Everything was too jumbled up in
my head. I needed organization. The facts needed to be sorted like credits and
debits.

Mama had no criminal record. That
went in the credit column. I thought some more. Mama had held down a job and
been an active community volunteer for years. Another item in the credit
column. Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with anything else for the credit
side of the ledger.

Her damaged car. The history of
antagonism with Erica. Mama’s unaccounted time on Tuesday evening. Her odd
behavior before and after Erica’s death. The verbal smackdown between the two
women on Monday night. All of those things were debits.

More than debits.

They painted a picture I didn’t
want to see.

A terrible picture that had Mama
behind bars for the rest of her life. The thing I kept coming back to was why
now? Mama had butted heads with Erica for years. Why would she wait to do something about it?

I needed more information.

There must have been an inciting
incident. All I had to do was dig deeper. Only, Mama and her friends were
holding out on me. I couldn’t very well ask the dead woman, and chances were
good her son wouldn’t humor me. Heck, he hadn’t even let me know he’d cancelled
on me.

Mama was in trouble, and nothing
I’d done so far had helped. I’d failed to look after her as Daddy had asked.
She’d messed up, but so had I. Fatigue hit me right between the eyes. I knew
what it felt like to give up. I’d quit on life once before, letting my emotions
paralyze me to the point of inertia.

In the back of my mind I heard
Mama’s voice. Stop that. Sampson women are stronger than this.

She’d been there for me when I was down. Is this how I repaid her? By giving up on her? Where was my faith in the
woman who’d given me life and nurtured me?

A spark of hope touched my gloomy
thoughts. What if I came at the problem from another angle? Sure, the body of
evidence pointed to Mama. But what if that had been engineered?

My pace slowed as the
implications sank in. Mama could have been framed. She could be squeaky clean
as she’d claimed all along. Well, not squeaky clean. She had a long history of
run-ins with the victim.

My blood chilled as the idea took
hold. Mama was the perfect patsy. A killer could have taken advantageous of her
outrageous, obstinate, and overbearing ways.

Yes. My stride lengthened. That
felt right. I was definitely onto something here.

The treadmill timer rang, and Gen bounced over to my side. An hour later, I hobbled out of the gym bathroom and
into the parking lot. Every muscle in my body had been stretched to its maximum
endurance, every tendon strained.

For what?

So I wouldn’t look like a wuss in
front of a woman I’d just met. Sad but true. It was barely noon on an overcast
Saturday morning, and I needed a nap. I limped toward my car.

I’d started this fitness program
to improve my golf swing. At the rate I was seizing up, I’d be lucky if I could
even swing my nine wood by the next ladies nine-hole outing on Wednesday.

Home beckoned, as did a long soak
in the tub. With Charlie taking the girls this afternoon, I’d have plenty of time to talk to Mama. She might not want to talk, but I’d be firm.

“Cleo. Wait up.” Darnell Reynolds
huffed over to intercept me. He wore a dark business suit, a blue tie, and a
white dress shirt. For our mayor, it was business as usual on a Saturday
morning.

“Hey, Darnell. What’s going on?”
I thanked God for showers and deodorant. Otherwise, I’d be standing here in
this herd of brightly colored cars, smelling like the queen of funk. As it was,
my jeans and white polo shirt struck just the right note of Saturday casual.
Shower-dampened hair cooled my head.

Darnell was my wealthiest
accounting client, and he’d steered a lot of business my way over the last five
years. I appreciated his efforts, even though I privately thought he was a
pompous ass. I hadn’t missed a quarterly appointment with him, had I? Or worse,
he wasn’t going to ask me out, was he? I held my breath.

He glanced around furtively, his
odd behavior ramping up my nerves. What was going on in this town? Who was the
mayor hiding from?

Did he expect the IRS to be skulking in the gym parking lot? I had it on good authority that the IRS only cared about people’s financial fitness. They could care less if I worked out or spoke to
my clients about nonbusiness matters.

“I need to talk to you,” Darnell
said. “Right away.”

“Here I am.” I shrugged as I
spoke. The slight motion had me wincing at the lactic acid built up in my
shoulder muscles.

He leaned in a bit closer. “This
is a private matter. Follow me to my office?”

Dang. A client request. He had me there. “Okay.”

Darnell drove his pickup like a
man possessed. I was thankful to be following him in the sturdy Gray Beast
instead of inside his very large, swerving vehicle. Every muscle in my body
pulled when I got out of my car.

I limped to his office in the
stately city hall building. He scurried behind the carved oak desk that had
belonged to his grandfather and stopped between the twin oils of the mountain
ranges guarding our valley. “What’s this about, Darnell?”

“That g.d. housing development, that’s what.” He closed the door behind us and paced around his office.

There was only one new development in Hogan’s Glen. White Rock. Darnell had gone in with the late Dudley Davis and put
together an upscale community on the edge of the city limits.

Houses were already under
construction when the state issued a building moratorium because of water
availability, halting construction. Consequently, White Rock was a ghost town.

“I thought you were working with
the state to get the moratorium lifted.”

“I am. The town bought the
Stewart farm to protect our wellheads. We’ve got new wells coming online soon.
We’ve got great water reuse ideas in the pipeline. Lots of water plans in the
works. It’s coming along, but it can’t happen tomorrow. Bureaucracies don’t move
that fast.”

I eased into the brown leather
chair across from his desk. “How can I help you, Darnell?”

Darnell halted in front of the
Maryland flag next to his desk. The redness of his neck and face worried me. His complexion wasn’t usually that florid. His neck seemed unusually thick and rigid, too.
Not a good sign. Something big was bothering Darnell.

“One of my silent partners wants
out. Today. I don’t have the money until I sell the lots and build the houses.
What am I going to do?”

“Why don’t you sit down with your
partner and explain the situation to him or her?” Was it Dudley’s ex-wife who
wanted to sell? I’d known Bitsy Davis for years, and if she was the problem, I
could see how Darnell thought I could persuade her to wait.

I’d drawn up the original
financial information for the investors in the development. There had been
another key investor, only I couldn’t remember who it was.

Darnell rubbed the back of his
neck. “Did that. Didn’t help.”

My brain slid into accounting
mode. “Show your silent partner the balance in the bank account.” Money always
talked. So did the lack of money.

“This person is unreasonable. I
explained how the corporation assets aren’t liquid and got nowhere. What the
hell am I going to do? If I sell enough of the land to buy this person out,
I’ll cripple the development and lose my shirt.”

“How about a gradual payoff?”

“Nope. This person wants the
entire chunk of change up front. And they want it yesterday.”

“Who are we talking about here?”

Darnell grimaced. “You don’t remember?”

I shook my head. My stiff neck
strained at the movement.

Darnell looked me straight in the eye. “Erica Hodges.”

Erica Hodges.

I was beginning to hate the sound
of her name. Every time it cropped up, something bad happened to my family. I
stated the obvious. “She’s dead.”

“But her heirs aren’t. I had a
phone call from her daughter, Eleanor, last night, demanding Erica’s share immediately.” Darnell wiped his brow. “It makes no sense to liquidate White Rock now.”

“Are there liquid funds in your
other investments that you could move around to cover Erica’s share in White
Rock?”

“No. I’m completely leveraged. I
never should have tied up so much of my personal money in this development.”

Another idea occurred to me. Maybe I could help Darnell. “What about Bitsy Davis? Why don’t you ask her if she’ll
purchase Erica’s share?”

A faint glimmer of hope appeared on Darnell’s face. “Would she do it?”

“I don’t know, but it won’t hurt
to ask.” I rose to leave.

Darnell reached for the phone,
hope flaring in his eyes. “Thanks, Cleo.”

I limped out of there, satisfied
I’d helped him. If only I could fix Mama’s troubles so easily. I checked my
watch. The girls were getting ready to spend the afternoon with their dad. Mama
wasn’t going anywhere without a car, but I dreaded the conversation we would
surely have.

The wind stirred my damp hair.
Here I was in downtown Hogan’s Glen on a Saturday morning. I wasn’t normally
down here this time of day. But Jonette was. She’d whip me into fighting shape
in short order.

The Tavern was around the corner
from city hall. As I hurried there, the breeze picked up and blew right through
my thin white shirt. A glance at the darkening sky alerted me of an approaching storm.

The thing about living in a
valley was that you couldn’t accurately predict how far away a weather system
was. Once you saw clouds over the mountain range, you might have a few hours or
a few minutes, depending on the height and speed of the front. With any luck,
the shower would come and go while I was at the Tavern.

I hugged my arms close to my body
and walked as fast as my aching muscles would allow. I stepped inside the
Tavern, entering a world where time stood still. It was permanently 1970s in
here, from the rock-n-roll paraphernalia dotting the walls to the raucous music
filling the cozy room. Due to the dark-red ceiling and the hunter-green walls,
the dim lighting seemed barely adequate.

The wonder of it was that Jonette
wasn’t blinded by sunshine after being in such a murky environment most of the time. I headed for her section in the back of the room.

“Cleo!” Jonette took one look at me and handed off the tray of food she carried to a solid pony-tailed man behind the bar.

“Dean, I’m going on break,”
Jonette said. “Take this to table five.” Jonette untied her black cocktail
apron and fixed us two cups of coffee. She slid in the booth across from me.