Lemon Tart (29 page)

With her free hand she pulled out her phone and once she
reached the sidewalk in front of Carrie and Jack’s house she began typing a
text message to Breanna. She’d have called, except Breanna never answered her
phone during class. It took an inordinately long time to type with one hand,
even using a few abbreviations. Although she was hesitant to involve her
daughter, she needed answers.

Did T drive C’s car home last
night? Call ASAP

She put the phone in her pocket and found herself looking at
Jack and Carrie’s house. The shades were drawn, the porch cluttered, as had
been its state the longer Jack had been away. Sadie wondered how many secrets
were held inside that quiet house.

Inside, she
repeated. That’s what she needed to do. Get inside!

She’d try doing it the right way first.

She headed up the front steps and knocked loudly on the door,
deciding she’d offer the cookies and tell Carrie she’d left something in the
guest room. That would give her a reason to be invited in, and once there . . .
she’d come up with another plan.

No one answered.

She knocked again and waited. Nothing. The heavy curtains—too
heavy for an entryway, in her opinion—made it impossible to see
through the front windows. Entryways should be light and welcoming, not shut
out visitors. Sadie tried the door—locked. She went back down
the porch steps and around the side of Carrie’s house. The windows were all
closed tight, the curtains drawn.

I have a key,
she told herself, then remembered that she’d given Jack and Carrie’s key to
Detective Madsen. She briefly wondered what he was going to do when he found
out the mistake, then pushed that thought from her mind. As she rounded the
back of the house she decided to try the back door. If it was unlocked, she
could go in and . . . look around. Should Carrie come home, Sadie
could use the same forgotten-item excuse to explain her presence
there. However, the back door was locked, and try as she might to peek through
the mini-blinds of the kitchen window, she couldn’t see a thing.

“Fine,” she said as if giving in to an argument, though she
wasn’t giving up. She would get into this house one way or another, but she’d
have to get creative or wait until Carrie
got home. Sadie headed down the back steps, then paused on the last one with
her foot in the air. Her eyes were drawn to the garbage cans lined up against
the garage. In two seconds
she was standing over the green Rubbermaid containers, but she didn’t have to
open them to know what was inside. Her nose was sending out an urgent alarm
even as she tried to talk herself out of it. But a mother never loses the
ability to diagnose certain things. There are simply some smells that remain
embedded on her senses for the rest of her life.

Sadie was willing to bet the entire plate of carrot cookies
still in one hand that she smelled diapers.

Carrot Cookies

1 cup butter

3⁄4 cup sugar

1 egg

1⁄4 teaspoon orange extract

1 cup cooked and mashed carrots (Steam carrots in
microwave until soft—don’t use baby
food—bleck!)

1 teaspoon grated orange zest

1 teaspoon baking powder

1⁄2 teaspoon salt

2
¹
/
₂
cups flour

1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Icing

2–3 teaspoons orange zest

3 tablespoons orange juice

Powdered sugar to consistency

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Cream butter and
sugar. Add egg, extract, carrots, and orange zest. Mix well. Add the remaining
ingredients and mix until combined. Roll into walnut-sized balls and
press flat with fingers or a fork on a greased cookie sheet. Bake 10
minutes.

For icing, mix zest and juice, then stir in
powdered sugar until icing is slightly thicker than a glaze. Drop by
teaspoonfuls onto warm cookies so icing melts into cookies.

Makes 2 to 3 dozen.

Chapter 30

Inside the
garbage can was a white plastic bag knotted at
the top. Sadie moved to the porch and put down the cookies before returning to
open the garbage bag. Not only were there a few dirty diapers, but also a shoe
box. Sadie picked the box out of the bag, thinking about the pink shoes that
she
still couldn’t picture Carrie wearing. Then again, she couldn’t picture Jack
dating Anne either, or Ron lying to her for months, or Anne being
strangled—yet she knew those things had
happened. Pink shoes didn’t seem too far-fetched in comparison. But
the box was a child’s shoe box, the picture showing Spider-man shoes
with Velcro tabs and lights in the heels. She pictured Trevor’s shoes sitting
by the back door of Anne’s house. The little boy had been barefoot when he left
the house. She also reviewed the trips to the store Carrie had taken
yesterday—as she pulled out a box for children’s Benadryl. Would
Carrie actually drug a toddler in order to force a nap so she could run errands?
Had she kept him downstairs so that in case he woke up, no one would hear him?
It was hard to imagine, and yet impossible to ignore the possibility.

There was one other thing in the garbage can that got Sadie’s
attention and she pulled the green hanging file from the bag, snagging the
metal end on the plastic. There was nothing unique about the file. Sadie had
the same kind in her own filing cabinet, but she’d seen stacks of them just
yesterday and that image was fresh in her mind. Scattered around Susan Gimes’s
office had been dozens of similar files. Anne’s file had been missing.

Susan’s voice from yesterday filtered back to her, “We’re
shorthanded today.”

Carrie’s calendar also came to mind. She’d marked working hours
for the next three weeks, but she hadn’t worked on Tuesday.

Susan had verified with her receptionist that K through M was
supposed to have been scanned in on Monday—Anne’s file should
have been among them.

What are the
chances? Sadie asked herself as she flipped the file open. It was empty,
except for the plastic tab that Sadie assumed had once been attached to the top
of the file.

Lemmon,
Anne

Sadie’s hands began to shake. Carrie’s temp job must have been
at Susan Gimes’s office. Carrie had found the file and put things together much
faster than Sadie had, but somehow had come to the conclusion that Jack, not
Ron, had been involved with Anne. Sadie wondered what it was that had made
Carrie figure it all out. Maybe she knew about Jack cashing in his retirement,
or only admitting to half the inheritance. Maybe she’d seen him talking to Anne
that one time and somehow put everything together. But the newest facts marched
through Sadie’s brain at a steady pace, not allowing her to focus on Carrie for
long. Sadie couldn’t seem to catch her breath and it had nothing to do with the
wind that was blowing directly into her face.

Trevor was
here.

Carrie knew about
the affair before Jack said she did.

Carrie confronted
Anne.

Jack’s taking the
fall for her.

“I did this,” Jack had said at the police station. “I did all
of this.”

“Dear heavens,” she said out loud. Were the documents still in
Carrie’s house? It would tie everything together.

Jack is
innocent.

I have to talk to
Detective Cunningham!

Sadie dropped the file back into the garbage can, picked up the
plate of cookies from the porch, and with hurried steps, moved to the side yard
closest to her house, already thinking of how to explain this information to
Cunningham. The side yard was about ten feet wide, with Jack and Carrie’s white
house siding on their side, and Sadie’s cedar fence on the other. Jack had
always talked about fencing in his own yard, but he never seemed to get around
to it, leaving only Sadie’s enclosed. She was almost to the end of her fence
line, where she could cut left for her front steps, when she heard an engine
shut off. A car door opened and then shut. She stopped just shy of the corner
of the house and pressed her back against the cold siding. Is it Carrie? she wondered.

Sadie could see her own house from the corner of Jack and
Carrie’s house, the black walnut tree close enough to the sidewalk that it
didn’t block her view from this angle. She was close, but she couldn’t talk to
Carrie right now and trying to cut from Carrie’s yard to her own front door
would make that inevitable. She’d just wait until Carrie went inside, then run
for her own house and call Detective Cunningham.

Sadie moved to stand against the side of Carrie’s house,
straining to hear footsteps heading for the door of the house, so she could
make her escape.

“Mrs. Wright?”

Sadie couldn’t see him, and he had to be several feet away, but
she knew it was Detective Madsen. She growled low in her chest and came as
close to swearing as she’d been since the time Shawn and Breanna had a
chocolate syrup and ketchup fight in the kitchen almost six years ago.

“Do you know where Mrs. Hoffmiller is? I understand she stayed
with you last night.”

Sadie’s heart leapt into her throat and she held the cookies
tighter against her chest. Why did he want to talk to her?

“I’ve been running errands,” Carrie said, though her tone
sounded the tiniest bit nervous. Sadie could imagine that hiding so much
information from the police would make anyone anxious. Carrie continued. “She
was gone before I got up this morning.”

“Is she here now?”

“No,” Carrie said. “I came back to pick up some things a while
ago and she was gone. Her car is in her driveway though.” Sadie wondered what
Carrie was driving. Had she picked Jack’s truck up from the police station or
did she have her car back?

“She isn’t answering her door,” Madsen said with annoyance. “So
you haven’t seen her?”

“No,” Carrie said. “If I do, I’ll tell her you’re looking for
her. I’ve got an appointment, Detective. Can I go inside now?”

There was a pause and Carrie’s cat, Pouches, came around the
corner from the back of the house. Sadie shooed at her, trying to get her to go
away, but instead Pouches continued out a few more feet—in full
view of both Sadie in her hiding spot and Carrie and Madsen in the driveway.
Pouches sat down, cocked her striped head at Sadie and meowed.

Sadie looked at her sternly. The last thing she needed was the
cat giving away her hiding place. “Go,” she mouthed—as if the
cat could not only understand the English language, but read lips as well.
Pouches stretched her front paws in front of her and laid down, still staring
at Sadie.

“Meow.”

Pouches had distracted Sadie from the conversation between
Detective Madsen and Carrie, but she tuned back in as soon as she realized
it.

“Do you recognize this?” Detective Madsen asked.

“That’s my house key,” Carrie said with alarm. “The one I gave
to Sadie. What are you doing with it?”

Sadie made a face. He’d discovered the key. Shoot. How on earth
was she going to explain that? And Carrie thought she’d just handed it over to
the detectives. Doggone it, why didn’t she give the right key in the first
place? Then she remembered she wouldn’t have been able to break into Anne’s
house last night if she’d handed over the real key.

“You don’t need to worry about that,” Detective Madsen said.
Instead of being angry, he seemed quite pleased with himself. One more reason
for him to suspect Sadie. She wondered if Cunningham knew about the key and
could imagine the lecture awaiting her if he did. At what point would they stop
threatening and actually arrest her for interference? Sadie had a sudden image
of herself in the green scrubs she’d seen on Jack a couple hours earlier. Green
had always washed her out.

Pouches rubbed against her leg and she nearly screamed. Looking
down, she scowled at the cat again, who was purring loudly and mewing at her.
It was true that Sadie sometimes bought canned cat food for Pouches as a
treat—Carrie would only buy the bargain dry food and even cats
deserved a little something extra on special days—but now she
wished she’d never spoiled the feline. It lay down on her feet, and turned its
sea-green eyes toward her.

“Meow.”

She removed a carrot cookie from the plate and tossed it a few
feet toward the back of the yard in hopes the cat would follow. Pouches looked
at it, then back at Sadie. Apparently carrot cookies looked and smelled nothing
like fish.

“Meow.”

Sadie shook her head, waiting to hear Carrie muse aloud why her
cat was acting so funny. But Carrie hadn’t seemed to notice just yet.

“I sure am
going to worry about you having a key to my house!” Carrie said loudly. “I want
it back.” The anger in her voice surprised even Sadie, who was used to hearing
Carrie go off about something or another. But it made sense for her to freak
out. Based only on the things Sadie had found in the garbage can, the idea of
the police being able to go inside her home at will must be horrifying.

“I’m sorry, but it’s part of a police investigation,” Detective
Madsen said. “It will be returned to you when we’re finished with it.”