Adams Grove 03-Wedding Cake and Big Mistakes (20 page)

Connor watched Carolanne walk down the block. Her step was quick. It seemed to have hit her hard that the girl in the pond may have been someone she’d known, even if briefly.

He went back and checked his calendar for the day. He owed that write-up to Mac, but that could wait. He didn’t know if his stomach was ready for what Carolanne was dishing up for breakfast, but he remembered his mom’s words.
It’s the thought that counts.

When he walked into Carolanne’s apartment, the boxes made his heart sink.

On the table, there were two plates of pancakes and chocolate milk.
My favorite.

This was a big step for Carolanne Baxter. He wasn’t sure what had broken the ice for her, but something had changed. The chair groaned as he slid it across the solid-oak floor to sit down.

He took a bite of the pancakes and almost choked.
Thank goodness she’s not here.
He spit the doughy, grainy mess out on the plate and drank the whole glass of milk just to get the taste out of his mouth.
How do you mess up pancakes?
He didn’t know how she’d done it, but she had.

Mom had always made the best pancakes. So light you felt like you had to hurry and top them with sticky syrup to keep them from floating away.
I miss you, Mom. Wish you could’ve shared some of your cooking skills with Carolanne before you left this earth.

Since Mom died, cooking had become like therapy. He’d made his way to the middle of her favorite cookbook—
Pass the Plate. If Carolanne would just follow a recipe, maybe her cooking would be edible.

Heading to the kitchen, he stopped mid-scrape by the trash can. Instead, he grabbed a plastic bag from the counter and scraped both plates of food, if you could call it that, into the bag. He washed the dishes and stacked them in the drainer. He’d throw the evidence away in his apartment, and she’d never be the wiser. No sense hurting her feelings. It had been a nice gesture, after all.

He stopped at the door of her apartment and turned back. It was going to be odd with this place empty, but he couldn’t imagine renting it out to anyone else.

In his apartment, he opened the cabinets under the sink to throw away the plastic bag with the disaster of a breakfast in it. When he spotted the hammer and screwdriver he stored there, a thought struck him about the Dixon farm trust.

Carolanne walked into the sheriff station praying Doris was wrong. Gina seemed like a nice girl, although Carolanne would admit that ever since she’d seen her coming out of her dad’s house, she’d had less-than-amicable feelings toward her—for no real good reason. That just made it worse if something had happened to her.

The deputy working at the front desk sent Carolanne down the hall.

She knocked on Scott’s door. “They said I could come on back. You busy?”

“Come on in. What’s up?”

“I owed you a visit about the thing on Saturday anyway, but this morning, Doris Huckaby stopped by the office. She thinks we might know who that girl was who drowned.”

“Oh? Well, come on in. Sit. How’s your dad?”

“He’s good. They released him yesterday.”

“Glad to hear it. So tell me what you know about our mystery girl.”

Carolanne cleared her throat and started from the beginning, telling him about how she’d met Gina and the girls’ connection with the Dixon farm. “Doris said she realized this morning that the girl who died might be the same girl—Gina.”

“Well, let’s see what you think.” Scott turned around and grabbed a folder from the stack on his credenza. He flipped through some pages and then pulled out a color image. He slid it across the desk.

She lifted the picture and held it closer.
It’s her.
Nausea swept over her, and she was glad she hadn’t eaten breakfast before coming down here, else she may have lost it right here and now. “It’s Gina. She told me her last name. I can’t remember—it’ll come to me.” Carolanne stared at the picture. “It wasn’t a suicide, was it?”

“Why would you ask that?”

Carolanne stared into the eyes of the girl in the picture, wishing she could ask her. “She’s not much younger than me, I don’t think. We talked that day I took her down to the library. Her mom had recently committed suicide. She was looking for answers. She’d said something like she didn’t want her mother’s past to be her future. Something like that. Anyway, I asked her if she needed help, and she said she wasn’t suicidal.”
I didn’t catch the connection before, but it makes sense now why I was so drawn to her. Our fears—they’re really the same.

“I doubt this was what she was looking for,” Scott said. “Sad story, but no, it wasn’t a suicide.”

“Good, I guess.” Carolanne nodded as she stared into those eyes. They haunted her and hung on her heart.
What were you looking for? Did you find it? Why were you with my dad?
She tried to remember the conversation she’d overheard snippets of that night, but all that consumed her whole mind was the picture of Gina, dead.

“So, we have a name.” Scott wrote it down on the front of the folder. “Maybe now we can weave the rest of this together. No one else has been able to shed any light at all.”

“She had a tattoo on her wrist. Did you see that?”

“Butterflies,” he said.

“Yes. Bright-blue butterflies. Doris spent some time with her that day. She may know more. Oh, and Doris said she’d sent Gina down to talk to Mac that day.”
I should tell him about her being at Dad’s house. Oh, Dad, what the…? I’m going to have to tell him.
“She said something about looking for her dad, too.”

Carolanne sucked in a steadying breath, forging the courage to tell Scott about the last time she’d seen Gina. “And—”

A uniformed deputy swept into the office. “Need you, Boss. We’ve got a problem. They’ve pulled over a guy up the road, and he’s got a pile of automatics in the trunk, and—”

Scott jumped up from his desk. “Thanks for the information. Tell Doris I’ll check in with her later.”

Carolanne sat there collecting her thoughts as the two men ran down the hall. She leaned over the desk and looked inside the folder from which Scott had pulled the picture. She knew more than they did at this point.

She backed out of the office and forced herself to walk down the hallway. Once outside, she bent over and tried to gather her composure. She felt ill, and her breath was coming in shallow, quick gasps. The same question played over and over in her mind
about her dad.
Did you have anything to do with that girl winding up dead? Please let me be wrong.

Her legs felt like noodles. She darted behind the building to take the alley back to the office. There was no way she could smile and make small talk with folks on Main Street right now. It was bad enough that a young girl was dead, but knowing her dad had lied, that was way too close to home.

She’d heard him tell Scott he didn’t recognize Gina from the picture, but that picture was clearly Gina. It was easy to identify. That couldn’t have been a mistake.

Carolanne racewalked her way down the alley. Small sheds hugged most of the Main Street businesses, containing excess inventory and seasonal decorations. Tuesday was trash day, so trash bins dotted a path down the left side of the street. A minivan sat right behind the bakery, but it wasn’t Mac’s. Maybe Mac had finally broken down and bought a second truck for deliveries.

The sugary-sweet smells from the bakery were usually a comfort, but today her stomach couldn’t take the heavy aroma. Carolanne stopped and leaned against the extra-tall wooden shed that hugged the brick bakery building. The blue stain on the shed had faded to a bluish-gray, but the glossy logo glistened in the morning sun.

She knelt down for just a minute, hoping she’d feel better. Something bright yellow and silver reflected in the sunlight, like a deflated Mylar balloon had blown into the corner between the building and the shed.

Carolanne walked over and tugged it from the crevice. Larger than a balloon, it only took her a moment to realize what she was holding. The extra-large tote bag had been fashioned out of potato chip bags. The same technique that Gina had used to weave bags from trash to treasure. The same brand of bag that she’d seen on Dad’s kitchen table.

Please don’t send these clues my way.
She was trying so hard to put the past behind her, but the world just didn’t seem to want her to have a happy ending.

Carolanne patted the bag. At first she thought it was empty, but she felt something inside. She opened the bag. There wasn’t much in there. Only gum wrappers and one of those free address book calendars you get at the card store. She looked at the printed address on the front of the calendar. This one had come from a Hallmark shop down in Jacksonville, Florida.

Papers fell from the address book. She gathered them up quickly and clutched the bag to her chest.
This is evidence. Take it back to the station.
But no matter how many times she repeated that to herself, her feet kept moving toward the old bank building.

She ran inside, went straight to her office, and closed the door. With the bag on the desk, she stared at it and then the phone. She could leave a message for Scott that she’d found it. Rubbing her neck, she felt the tension crawl into her shoulders.
What am I doing? What am I even looking for? This is not my job.

She stood behind her desk for a long moment, not sure what to do. She slid her hand inside the bag and pulled out the address book. She tipped the stack of papers tucked inside out onto the desk. With a sweeping motion, she spread all the receipts, cards, and papers across the desk like a blackjack dealer breaking out a new deck of cards.

Each piece might tell her more about what Gina had been up to and ultimately what had happened to her. Some of the receipts were from almost two weeks ago.
How did she stay under the radar so long?
In a town this size, that wasn’t easy. Carolanne’s hand hovered over the Florida driver’s license.
Regina Lee Edwards. Edwards—that was her last name.
This picture showed a happier Gina. At least this would give Scott not only her name, but an address, too. There was also a pawn ticket from Billy’s Pawn Shop in Jacksonville, a bus ticket, a coupon for a free cupcake from
Mac’s Bakery, a business card from Mac’s Bakery with Derek’s name and a cell phone number scribbled on the back, and the Baxter and Buckham business card she’d given her the day they’d met.
Was she staying at Dad’s all that time? She said she was staying at a friend’s house, but if Dad was the friend, wouldn’t Gina have known I was his daughter?

Carolanne flipped through the calendar. The handwriting was neat, but most of the notes on the address pages were just random thoughts. She must’ve been using it as a notepad. Some pages had numbers listed, others tasks. About midway through, under the
MNO
header, there was an address in Brooklyn, New York, but no name was listed. Maybe whoever lived on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn could tell Scott more about what was on Gina’s mind.

Is this where you were headed? Please let this guy in New York be your dad.
The thought of her own father having had a child with another woman would be more than she could take.

As much as Carolanne wanted to stay out of this whole mess, especially if there was any chance her dad was involved, she knew she couldn’t. She felt the need to clear any suspicion that her dad was involved. Plus, she felt a connection to Gina, and if looking into her mother’s past had landed her dead, she sure didn’t deserve that. Someone needed to pay.
I just pray it’s not you, Dad.

Connor hit the door with a double knock and opened it, startling her. “What are you doing here? I thought you’d still be down talking to Scott.”

“I just got back,” she said.

“Thanks for the breakfast. That was a nice thought.”

“Glad you liked it,” she said.

“So, was it the Dixon girl?”

Carolanne couldn’t even speak. She just nodded.

His expression was tight. “I was just thinking about that trust. If her mom is dead, that means Gina would have been the sole heir
to that property. Truth is, I’d always been under the impression that Lindsey Dixon was the last living member of that family. She never mentioned a daughter, and I’d checked in with her several times over the years.”

“That day in the library, Gina seemed either unaware of her uncle’s drowning accident, or she really just didn’t want to talk about it. That could be the reason.”

“The Dixon farm is a nice piece of land. I wonder if she had anything to do with that chain being down the other day.”

“Don’t know. Could be. She was definitely on a hunt for information.”

“Deadly information.”

“Don’t say that. It creeps me out.”

“But it’s true. Maybe she’s not related to the Dixons, or maybe someone else was more interested in that land than Gina was.” He stepped inside her office. “What’s all that mess?”

“I found it in the alley on my way back. It’s a tote bag—Gina’s tote bag.”

He gave her a warning look. “You should have left it right where it was and called Scott.”