Scoop to Kill (23 page)

“Maybe we gotta break out that dictionary again? Look up ‘middle’? Because the way I see it this Ashley girl has a secret that needs telling, and you’re the one whose lips are moving.”

“Believe me, Cal, I don’t particularly want to be sitting here having this conversation. But through no fault of my own, I happen to know she’s pregnant. And that she didn’t plan to tell your family. Would you have preferred I keep my mouth shut?”

“No,” he snapped, dropping his fork to his plate with a bone-jangling crash.

He shoved his fingers through his short salt-and-pepper hair. Men tended to do that a lot when I was around. Not sure why.

He blew out a big breath and picked up his fork again.

“Look, I’m sorry. I’m glad you told me. I just . . . What was he thinking, Tally?”

I shrugged one shoulder and took a bite of egg. “He’s young and male. She’s cute and blond. There might have been alcohol. I doubt thinking had anything to do with it.”

“But a student? And he wasn’t even safe about it.”

I rolled my eyes. “Again, all perfectly good, rational arguments, which would have meant exactly nothing to that boy in the heat of the moment. Besides, you don’t know that he wasn’t safe. You can carry an umbrella and still get wet.”

Cal choked on a bite of toast, and took a sip of his coffee to wash it down. But by the time he set down his cup, a faint, wistful smile had graced his face.

“Marla will be happy,” he said.

“Even under the circumstances?”

“She won’t give a rat’s ass about the circumstances. All she’ll care about is having a grandbaby.”

I poked the tines of my fork at my omelet, weighing my words. “I just hope she remembers that Ashley’s the mama.” Cal narrowed his eyes, bracing for an argument, but I held up a hand to forestall him. “Look, it’s between Marla and Ashley. All I’m saying is the girl’s as skittish as an unbroke colt, and Marla might get further with her if she slow-played her hand.”

He snorted. “I just hope Ashley’s feeling skittish and not guilty.”

“I really don’t think she killed Bryan. And I can’t even imagine how or why she would have killed Emily.”

“I appreciate your expert opinion, Detective Jones. Since all signs point to Emily Clowper killing Bryan and then taking her own life, I’m inclined to agree with you. But I hope you don’t mind if I let the police confirm that story.”

“Of course not. Especially since I happen to think Emily Clowper was absolutely innocent and was murdered herself,” I said, lifting my coffee cup in a mock salute.

“Good Lord, woman. Are you still clinging to that story?”

“It’s not a story,” I said. “Look, I don’t expect you to believe me, but you don’t need to make fun of me.”

Cal grew serious. “Is that what you think? That I’m making fun of you?”

“Aren’t you?”

He shook his head. “No, ma’am. I am not. You follow your own gut. I admire that.”

I felt a wave of heat wash up my face. That was quite a compliment coming from Cal, and I didn’t know how to respond.

“Now,” he said, picking up his fork and pointing it at me, “if you’re done playing detective, why don’t you tell me about that ice cream cake you’re making for tonight.”

I laughed, relieved. “Are you gonna pick nits with my cooking now, too?”

He held up his hands in mock surrender. “Darlin’, I know when I’m outgunned. I can’t boil water without burning it. You cook. I eat.”

 

With everything I had on my plate, I seriously considered letting the American-lit final slide. But I don’t like leaving tasks undone, and the thought of failing without trying rankled.

So between brunch with Cal and the fund-raiser for Bryan’s scholarship, I found myself back in Sinclair Hall, waiting to take a makeup test.

I knocked on Reggie’s door, and he led me to a classroom on the first floor. It was significantly smaller than the lecture hall in which our class had met. Instead of the long stationary tables, the room was filled with rows of individual desks, all empty save one.

“Ashley?”

She looked up from her test. Her hair looked cleaner, her face less wan. She still wore sweats, but they seemed cleaner and the shirt matched both the pants and the scrunchy holding her ponytail in place.

She smiled. A thin smile, but a smile.

“I figured I ought to finish this stinkin’ class and graduate before I have a kid to tote around,” she said.

“Good girl.”

Reggie directed me to a chair several rows away from Ashley and set my exam down on the desk.

“You have two hours,” he said. “Do your own work. I’ll check in on you occasionally.”

I read through the test and answered the obvious questions, but I had a hard time concentrating. My mind had already jumped ahead to the logistics of the evening’s event, and I found myself jotting down notes about how much Dublin Dr Pepper I would need for the Pink Pepperberry milk shakes I was making for Crystal and Jason’s wedding.

I forced myself to focus on the longer essay question, and was staring at the whiteboard at the front of the class trying to formulate my answer, when I noticed the faint writing there . . . the ghostly residue left from some class of yore. It looked like a language class of some sort, because the words weren’t at all familiar.

I read the words over and over, something jarring loose in my poor, overstuffed brain.

Qui
.

Of course! Q-U-I-T-A-M, the notation on Bryan’s calendar. We’d all assumed it was “quit a.m.” because those were words and phrases we recognized.
English
words and phrases.

But what if they weren’t English words at all?

I looked at my test, then back at the board, then at my test.

The little voice in the back of my head that makes me drive the speed limit (almost always) and floss every day (religiously) was screaming bloody murder. I couldn’t just walk out without even trying to answer the test questions. That would be wildly irresponsible, even if I didn’t have any real interest in the class in the first place.

I started writing, furiously, filling up several pages of a bluebook with an essay on themes of individual responsibility in Depression-era literature. I wasn’t going to win any awards for my keen literary insight, but I did enough to quiet my conscience.

I closed the bluebook, tucked the exam inside, and dashed out into the hall.

Reggie was strolling back toward the classroom, his hands in his pockets.

“You done?”

“Yes,” I said, handing him my exam. “But I have a question.”

I grabbed him by the elbow and steered him to the doorway of the classroom. “That,” I said, pointing. “What does that say?”

He glanced down at me like I was a crazy person—which, in fairness, I surely seemed to be—but then squinted at the faint letters on the whiteboard.

“It’s French,” he said. “‘With whom? With me! With you! With you! With us!’ It’s an exercise on pronouns.”

“So what does q-u-i mean?”

“ ‘Who’ or ‘whom.’ ”

“What about t-a-m?”

“My French isn’t the best, but that’s not a word I recognize.”

“Huh. But ‘qwee’ means ‘who’?”

He laughed. “Yes, but it’s pronounced ‘key’.”

I felt like I’d been sucker punched.

That was what Emily had been saying the night she called. Not Tim’s keys, but
qui tam
.

I still didn’t know what it meant, but the answer was so close I could taste it.

I
briefly considered telling Finn what I’d learned, but couldn’t bring myself to raise his hopes again if this lead didn’t pan out. It was still possible that Emily had been out of her mind, incoherent, that night on the phone. And I wasn’t about to say anything to Cal until I had a suspect wrapped up in a nice pretty bow for him.

I had to put my bush league investigation on hold for the evening, while I got the fund-raiser taken care of.

The evening of the fund-raiser for the Bryan Campbell Scholarship, I about had a conniption. A Friday night in June, I had to leave the A-la-mode fully staffed, so I was on my own hauling ice cream cake to the Gish-Tunny Center. And, of course, the elevator was out, so I had to schlep the boxes of cake up two flights of stairs, taking them at a jog so the cake wouldn’t melt before I got it into the freezer in the prep space behind the ballroom.

By the time the festivities got under way and I was able to turn over the task of plating the cake to Deena Silver’s competent catering minions, I had worked up a bit of a sweat and had very little patience left.

Against my wishes, I was seated at the head table. I tried to finagle a seat next to Rosemary Gunderson, with the hope that we could pass the evening talking about our respective pets, but somehow I ended up between Cal and Jonas Landry. I had to restrain myself from physically recoiling from Jonas’s presence.

Finn Harper, with his camera around his neck, lurked around the ballroom with a hangdog expression on his face. I got so tired of looking at his pitiful mug that, between the salad and the main course, I pulled him behind a big potted ficus.

“What the heck is your problem tonight?” I hissed.

“I don’t have a problem.”

“BS. You look like someone just kicked your dog.”

“I guess maybe I don’t like seeing you all lovey-dovey with Cal McCormack.”

I rolled my eyes. “First off, we’re not lovey-dovey. I helped him plan this party, and now I’m sitting next to him. Big freakin’ deal. Second off, I can get lovey-dovey with anyone I want, and I don’t think you get to have a say. Heck, you’re fixin’ to leave Dalliance again, so what difference does it make to you what I do or who I see?”

“I haven’t made a decision about staying in Dalliance yet. And I just don’t want to see you make a mistake with your life,” Finn said.

“Uh-huh. And dating a successful, law-abiding man would be a huge mistake.”

“Cowboy Cal’s got a poker so far up his ass he’s gonna choke on it,” Finn growled.

“You silver-tongued devil,” I chided.

Finn colored, but he didn’t back down.

“You know I’m right. You deserve better than that.”

“That,” I said with exaggerated emphasis, “is called being a grown-up. Something you could learn a little about, Finn Harper.”

“Dammit, Tally, this isn’t about being an adult. I take care of my own business, and you know it. But you need someone to balance you out, someone who’ll take some risks and get you to move outside your comfort zone.”

And there it was in a nutshell: Finn still saw me as a fixer-upper. With the right man in my life, I could be fun. But the woman I actually was, on my own two feet, played it too safe for Finn’s tastes.

“Cal’s not that man,” Finn continued.

“And you are?”

He glanced away, just for a split second, but it was enough for me to see the indecision in his face.

Enough for me to know that Finn might have intentions, but he couldn’t make promises.

“We were good together, Tally.” He pulled me close to the lean length of him.

A tiny corner of my mind grumbled that it didn’t feel quite right. This Finn had more muscle, more weight, more gravity than the Finn who held me all those years ago.

Maybe not quite right, but pretty darned wonderful . . . I had a second to get lost in the bracing clean of mint and evergreen and the delicious pressure of his hands on my back before he kissed me.

Twenty years fell away, and the teenage Tally wrapped her fingers around Finn’s shoulders and held on for all she was worth. We were good together. So, so good.

Really. Good.

I couldn’t form a coherent thought, but I didn’t really need to. This, I knew. I felt. I did. I kissed him back with a passion I thought I’d lost.

I had my hands on the placket of Finn’s shirt, pulling futilely at the fabric, when he came up for air. His face swam into focus, and what I saw there made my heart lurch.

Desire.

Very grown-up desire.

Somewhere nearby, someone dropped a dinner plate with an almighty clatter. I was suddenly painfully aware that I was tangled up with a man while over two hundred and fifty people tucked in to chicken with apricot glaze and green beans amandine about ten feet away.

“Finn, not now,” I said, pushing him away.

“If not now, then when?” he asked.

But he let me go.

 

The rest of the meal passed in a blur. I made small talk with Marla and Steve, both of whom thanked me for helping with the event. I felt guilty accepting their gratitude when I supported the woman they held accountable for their son’s death. We all just wanted the truth, but I somehow felt like a double agent, a traitor to their cause.

And I did get a chance to chat with the Gundersons. George politely inquired after Alice, and looked disappointed that she’d had to work at the A-la-mode for the evening. The thought crossed my mind that the Gundersons taking a grandparent-ly interest in Alice might be a good thing. They were cultured people, had connections outside of Dalliance, and, frankly, they had money. Knowing people like the Gundersons couldn’t hurt.

The ice cream cake was a hit. I’d combined peanut butter, fudge, graham crackers, and marshmallow to pay homage to the peanut butter s’mores Bryan used to make when he went camping with his dad and Cal. It made Marla cry.

When the DJ announced Patty Loveless’s “Blue Memories,” couples swarmed onto the dance floor and slipped into the hold for the Texas two-step.

Cal pushed away from the table and offered me his hand. I took it, feeling my heart leap at the warmth of his skin. I caught the faint scent of leather and starch, homey, masculine scents that made me feel strangely safe.