Keeping Mum (A Garden Society Mystery) (7 page)

It frustrated Cam, as her real goal had been to question her dad and the stream was steady enough that he rarely sat, but it was still companionable. Finally, Annie broke onto the conversational freeway Cam felt they needed to approach.

“So you’re dating power women now?” Annie teased.

“Shucks, Vivian and I have been friends for years.”

“I don’t remember her,” Cam said.

“Sure you do, sunshine. Aunt Vi?”

“Aunt Vi?” Cam knew Aunt Vi was not an actual relation, but had in fact been her mother’s college roommate. Cam hadn’t seen her since she was in elementary school and never would have recognized the professional woman she saw the night before from the big hair and miniskirt of her memory. “Are you sure?”

Her dad laughed. “I didn’t recognize her either. It’s been twenty years. I suppose being a lawyer will curb someone’s style a little.”

“Man, no kidding!” Cam scratched her head. “Wasn’t she blonde?”

“I guess not naturally. It was different times. Your mother and I got married before . . . well . . . the silly hair and all. So we didn’t get too caught up, though I remember shoulder pads that made Mom look like a linebacker.”

Cam grinned. The eighties hadn’t missed her mother entirely. Cam also remembered a fitness craze that involved Lycra and leotards and a tall-bangs thing her mother had tried for a while.

“So how did you and Aunt Vi reconnect?” Cam asked.

“Facebook!”

Cam almost dropped her sandwich. “I didn’t know you were on Facebook.”

“Well no. I can hardly have my daughters monitoring who I talk to.”

“I’m his Facebook friend,” Annie said.

Cam stood and let out a disgruntled noise.

“Annie doesn’t care who I flirt with,” her dad argued.

“It’s true,” Annie said. “I dig that your dad’s a babe magnet.”

“I wouldn’t judge!” Cam said.

Annie dropped her head so she was looking at Cam through her eyebrows. The front bell dinged and Cam’s dad rose. When he was out of earshot, Annie whispered.

“Let me do this. He has like forty friends and he doesn’t want to worry what you think. I’ll keep an eye.”

Cam was still a little offended, but she supposed it made some sense. Annie cheered every time her dad got lucky, and Cam preferred not to think about it. But Annie would tell her if anything big happened, or if anybody who was a bad idea appeared in the mix.

She was just about to clarify that with Annie when her dad returned, looking pleased. “I gave her a sample of that pumpkin cheesecake and she ordered one for Thanksgiving.”

Annie looked back at the cheesecakes. Two pieces were missing from one. Her jaw dropped.

“What?” her dad asked. “I tried it and it was fantastic!”

Annie rolled her eyes. “I can’t leave you unsupervised!”

Her dad chuckled. Cam knew that he preferred to think of himself as a bit of a renegade.

She finally worked up the nerve to ask her dad about the night before—about what he saw and did, and how frequently he was with his date throughout the evening.

“Well, she was the victim! I hardly saw her once she got up from supper to powder her nose! Though we were both surrounded by people the whole time, if that’s what you’re asking.”

It was, but now that he said it, Cam felt guilty for it. She hadn’t been accusing
her dad
, but the question sounded like it.

“I’m sorry, Daddy. I just . . . from a motive perspective . . . Vi may run against Jared, and having his event go wrong . . . really wrong . . .”

“She’s not running for that seat. She’s going for the House of Delegates.” He looked very proud.

“Really?”

“Not that she said anything about cronyism in the state Senate,” he said.

Annie snorted.
Great.
Cam didn’t need the two of them feeding off each other when she was trying to get to the bottom of something.

“You said she got up to powder her nose. When?”

“Dessert. Because I got to finish hers—she’d left it.”

“And had she just gotten her role?”

“As a matter of fact, she had.”

Annie made a frustrated noise. “That was us. We told her to use the excuse, but to get out to the murder scene.”

Cam nodded. “Okay, so what about during the party—before supper. Did you and she ever talk to Derrick?”

“Not me. Though when I stopped to shake Alden’s hand—you know, because of you girls—I did hear her scoff at him and say, ‘You wish!’”

“At Derrick?”

Cam’s dad nodded, looking proud again. Cam thought he hadn’t quite processed the implications.

“Did she say what it was about?”

“Didn’t ask. I figured it was politics.”

“Okay. Did you see anything that might have been a clue about Annie’s dad?” Cam asked.

“No . . . I did see him later, though, after supper. And I know what time it was. Or . . . well, I can tell you. Because I got a game hint: where I was supposed to go and what to say for the game. It came on my phone—the alibi I was supposed to be using.”

He pulled his phone out and scanned his texts.

“Nine forty-two. So I saw him at maybe nine forty.”

“Was he with anyone?” Annie asked.

“Not that I saw. He was on the phone and it didn’t look game related.”

“We can get that,” Annie said. “Jake can look up who he talked to.”

“And
where
was he?”

“Fairway of the first hole. I was at the tee.”

“Fairway? That’s where Derrick was.”

“Well, I saw the crowd, but my first clue, officially, was on the other side of the clubhouse, so I quit following the crowd. Alden was a little farther down.”

“So that means he was taken after the murder,” Cam said.

“It would seem so.”

“It also means he might have seen it,” Annie said.

Cam wrote down the details. It wasn’t much, but it was definitely more than what they’d known before. Not that Jake would have shared details with her, though maybe he would with Annie. It was
her
dad, after all, who was missing.

• • •

• • •

W
hen lunch was over and they all rose and hugged, Annie asked Cam if she could stick around awhile.

“Sure. That fiasco last night was my big event, and a press release entirely devoid of the Roanoke Garden Society was my response. It’s been sent to the watchdogs—apparently explosive political news has channels to go through that gardening news doesn’t, even if there is a body involved. Plus, the office phones have been forwarded to my cell. If there’s an emergency, I’ll know.”

They sent Cam’s dad off, then Annie got behind the counter and began taking inventory, not meeting Cam’s eyes.

“Did you know he was leaving her?” Annie said, without turning to Cam.

“He . . . your dad? Elle?”

Annie nodded. “He gave me several hints last night that it just wasn’t working. I puzzled it out while I tried to sleep. You know politicians and euphemisms, but I’m sure that’s what he meant. You don’t think she’d . . .”

“Why didn’t you tell me the hints last night?”

“I hadn’t worked out that they
were
hints. Denial maybe?”

“Did you tell Jake?” Cam asked.

“I’ve barely seen him.”

“Tell Jake. That might be important! Now
why
is he leaving her?”

“He didn’t say it that clearly—just that it wasn’t working.”

“Infidelity? Annoying factor?”

“Seriously,” Annie said. “I wish I knew.”

“Well, tell Jake. He certainly has a lot better resources than I do. But I’ll help however I can. Are you thinking of doing anything?”

“A couple of bugs?”

“Like . . . spying bugs?”

Annie nodded. “Phone, purse, kitchen.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“It’s illegal in court, but I just want to know if that harpy had anything to do with my dad disappearing, so I can go kick her butt myself if she did.”

Cam imagined she’d feel the same way—maybe more so. Cam actually
liked
her dad. But she looked at Annie, all of five feet, two inches. Still, Annie was pretty resourceful where gadgets were concerned. There was no reason to think gadgets of torture to get her revenge on Elle would be less likely than these bugs, though Annie-torture would probably include a lot of itching and embarrassment rather than pain.

“So what? We go then . . . you say you have something in a room . . . then plant it when she’s not looking?”

“Yeah, but we gotta be prepared for her to come with me instead of you. We each need a few bugs on us.”

“I’ll need a lesson.”

“Silly. Don’t you ever just browse online for how all this stuff works? I used to try to make my own.” Annie said it as if it were normal, but then she’d been taking things apart to see if she could get them back together since they were kids.

Cam was uncomfortable, but also a little thrilled at this espionage idea. Annie had helped her a lot. She’d paid the price for helping, over and above what could be expected. Besides, if she was honest, this investigation excited her.

• • •

• • •

C
am and Annie debated when they might actually miss seeing Elle altogether. Neither of them wanted to be stuck in a conversation. Annie thought Elle did a spinning class in the afternoon, so they decided to go right away, Annie coaching Cam on the finer points of bug planting on the way. Unfortunately, either the jet lag hadn’t left her the energy for exercising or something was going on.

Now that it was light, Cam could see the state of the garden at the front of the house. She pointed out the rhododendrons, a pair of them, that were leaping from their edge. “Those should probably be trimmed or moved. Now is the time, right before we get a freeze.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, Henry Larsson has had other things to do for a few weeks. I’m sure he’s been contacted,” Annie said. She rang the bell.

The housekeeper greeted them.

“Hi, Louise,” Annie said. “I left something here that I hoped to pick up. Is Elle around? I don’t want to bother her.”

Louise, who had been the housekeeper as long as Cam had known Annie and had been gray-haired even in those days, got a dark look. “She won’t go anywhere. It’s like she’s afraid I’ll toss her things on the street,” she whispered.

“Would you?” Annie whispered back with a playful grin.

“I’d like to some days, but it’s not worth my job.” Then, more loudly, she said, “Ms. Elle is up in the home gym if you need to see her. Can I get you girls some tea?”

“Oh, no thank you. We won’t be long. I’m not sure if what I need would be in dad’s study or up in the library. Cam, why don’t you check the study?”

Cam nodded. She thought she knew what she needed to do. Annie climbed the stairs and Cam entered the big study near the front door, where Alden handled some portion of his local business when he wasn’t in Richmond. Since his last term had ended a few years earlier, that had been often. Cam sat in his big leather chair and took off the piece of the phone she needed to remove in order to install the bug and fiddled the little thing into place.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Cam looked up to see Elle.

“Oh. Annie had some paperwork she thought her dad might have filed for her. I’m trying to figure out where he might have put it in here, and Annie is up checking the library.”

“I mean to the phone.”

“When we were little, he used to tape his combinations and stuff on the phone in different locations,” she lied. “I just thought . . . in case it was in the file drawer.”

“It has a key. And we keep the keys in the bedroom. What kind of papers are you looking for?”

“Her birth certificate. Annie has to renew her passport, so she needs it.” It was a stupid answer, but Cam had to think on her feet, so it was all she could manage.

“And
she
doesn’t have it? She’s a big girl.”

Elle looked disgusted, like Annie was an irresponsible child, which was stupid. Elle was probably only three years older than they were and had never supported herself a day in her life. Was it more irresponsible to store a document at a parent’s home or to marry for money so you didn’t have to get a job?

“Well what do you need it for besides getting a passport or driver’s license? The last time Annie did those things, she was living at home.” Cam knew her smile was sour.

“I’ll be right back,” Elle said.

Cam heard her climbing the stairs and let out a breath. On a whim, she darted across the entry to a similar “hers” study and tucked the other bug behind a gadget on a high shelf, then returned to the senator’s study and noticed Louise watching her curiously.

“And what was that about, Miss Camellia?” she asked, her frame stiff.

Cam sighed. “Senator Schulz. We don’t want to think Elle had anything to do with it, but we have to be sure.”