I needed to go home and raid Nancy’s maple syrup candy samples. Everything I tried seemed to arrive at a dead end. Then again, if I did that, I’d need yet another fitting with my wedding dress seamstress because I’d have gained weight.
Either way, it was time to go home. My dogs had been alone all day, and the excited full-body-lean welcome that only big dogs gave would help me almost as much as eating my way into a sugar coma.
What I wasn’t willing to do was go back out the front door. Going out the back door would mean a longer walk in the cold, but less chance of running into someone I knew who’d have questions about Mark.
I turned in the direction of the back door.
A woman’s voice that I didn’t immediately recognize called my name from behind me.
Too late.
I turned slowly. If this was someone who simply wanted gossip, I was going to tell them that I couldn’t discuss the case for confidentiality reasons except to say that Mark was innocent.
Mark’s house cleaner, Bernice McCloud, huffed down the hallway toward me. Mark and I had been talking just last week about whether to replace Bernice when she retired or to clean our house ourselves.
“I thought that was you,” she said. “I’m glad I caught you. I didn’t know if I should try to call you or Mark or if he was…Henry told me what happened.”
She twisted her fingers together and broke eye contact as if asking if he was in jail would be as bad as suggesting he’d died.
If this was going to be the reaction from people who knew us, I’d found another reason to prove Mark innocent as quickly as possible. I couldn’t stand awkward conversations everywhere I went.
Though she might be feeling awkward for an entirely different reason. I knew Bernice and Henry had five boys, two of whom were still in college. One was doing his master’s degree. That probably hadn’t left them much money. They might live paycheck to paycheck right now. “If you’re worried about your check, I’ll make sure it’s taken care of. It’s every other Friday right?”
“It is but…” She pulled at her fingers so hard I worried she might dislocate one. “The thing is I don’t…I don’t do windows, and I don’t do blood.”
Oh. Right. Having to ask me about that was even worse than having to remind me about her pay. And I might not have thought of it had she not brought it up. Even though I’d worked with people who’d had crimes happen in their buildings, I’d never been the one to hire the professional crew to clean up the biomatter left behind. Had she not thought of it herself, the poor woman would have gone in to clean Mark’s house next week and found a horror scene.
“Take this coming week off—paid of course—and I’ll make sure to get someone in to take care of it before the following week, okay?”
She bobbed her head and backed off down the hall, reminding me a bit of a frightened cat who wanted to run from a dog but didn’t feel safe turning its back on the other animal.
This day was getting better by the minute—sarcasm most definitely intended. I guess I should look on the bright side. Bernice hadn’t outright quit.
One foot from the back door, my phone vibrated in my coat pocket. Maybe Anderson had somehow managed to track down the real owner of the disposable phone. A girl could always hope, despite the logical side of my brain knowing there was no way he could have results that fast.
I grabbed my phone. The name on the screen was Hal’s. I slid my finger across the screen to answer.
“This might have been the easiest work you’ve ever given me, Miss Dawes,” Hal said. “But I don’t think you’re going to like what I’ve come up with.”
For the first time, I wished Hal pulled his punches or sugarcoated things or any of the other clichés that meant he’d soften whatever news I wasn’t going to like. “Tell me fast, then.”
Fast didn’t make ripping a Band-Aid off hurt any less, but it did get the pain over with quicker. Hopefully the same would be true of unpleasant news.
“Westbay teaches school in Washington State now. I found him online first try in a school directory there. The school says he was at work Thursday and Friday, so unless he hired a hitman on a teacher’s salary, he’s not the guy.”
And there went the rest of my hope for a lead on who’d done this. “You’re sure you got the right guy.”
“His last name’s one of the rarest in the U.S., but I called him just in case and pretended I got a piece of his mail, looked important, from the government. Then I read him the address for the guy by the name that lived here in Michigan, and he confirmed it was him.”
It’d been a long shot anyway. “What about the other name and license plate number I gave you?”
Please say you found nothing, I silently urged him.
“That one’s a weird one. Are you sure you gave me the right name? ’Cause the lady you’re looking for doesn’t exist.”
I drooped back against the wall next to the door. That wasn’t the kind of nothing I’d been hoping for.
When I took Isabel’s phone number, I’d had her add it and her name directly to my phone. I hadn’t wanted to risk not getting it right and missing my opportunity to have fantastic cupcakes at my wedding. “I’m sure the name is correct.”
“Well”—I could almost hear him shaking his head on the other end of the call—“I found two Isabel Addingtons. One’s eight years old and lives in Colorado, and the other one died in 1940.”
13
I shouldn’t do what I was considering.
I mimicked Mark’s tactic and drove around in circles rather than going straight home, hoping I’d come up with a better idea. Because my only idea right now required me to break into Isabel’s food truck to find some evidence of who she really was.
After Hal’s announcement that Isabel basically didn’t exist, I’d given him her license plate number to run—C6H12O6. I’d remembered it because Mark had laughed so hard he inhaled cupcake into his lungs the first time he saw it. When he finally stopped coughing enough to talk, he’d explained to me why it was so funny. Isabel’s license plate number was the chemical equation for glucose.
Hal came back to me with a response almost right away. Her plates were registered to a numbered company incorporated in Florida. He’d run a search for directors to see if he could locate what Isabel’s real name might be. He’d come up empty.
The corner to head for Sugarwood came and went, and I turned in the opposite direction again. If I kept this up much longer, I’d need to stop for gas.
Had I known Isabel wasn’t who she said she was back when she packaged up the cupcakes yesterday, I could have been careful and taken the package straight to the police. They might have been able to take a print from it.
Though that assumed anyone would have listened to me enough to consider that her prints needed to be run. They wouldn’t waste resources on a hunch. It also assumed that her prints would be in the system. Your average person wasn’t. If she had no criminal history and no military record, her prints would come back without any potential matches.
Lying to me about her name wasn’t a crime. I wasn’t federal law enforcement. Being in the same locale as a crime, even while a crime was being committed, wasn’t a crime. Unless I could prove Isabel had been directly involved with Troy’s death or Chief McTavish’s disappearance, I couldn’t reliably say she’d done anything wrong.
