The thought made Joyce feel sick to her stomach. Yet another of Trina’s tentacles grasping at Joyce’s life.
As she drove along, they passed the center of town with its patch of green and welcoming gazebo. They headed out of town a distance, through the strip mall with the nail place that Joyce liked to go to for a quick manicure when she was in a hurry, and finally pulled into a lawyer’s office mimicking an old colonial building with its candles in the windows and brick façade.
Joyce didn’t pull in after Trina. She didn’t want Simon to see her there, too, when he joined Trina for the meeting.
Joyce decided to turn around and get a manicure at the nail place. Her nails were bitten down to the quick, and it would soothe her to have the ritual of it all. There was only one other car in the parking lot during the odd midday time. It was the expensive kind of shiny and black and almost as out-of-place in the strip mall as Joyce’s Jaguar.
The tinkle of the bell soothed Joyce immensely as she stepped through the door, but upon entering the salon she saw the young woman who she usually worked with was busy with another client. Middle-aged, with a blunt blonde bob and expensive clothes. Her voice rang through the small space.
“I’m here just visiting for a bit,” the blonde said as the nail technician scrubbed her nail beds. “It’s all rather tragic, and I don’t really want to talk about it.”
Joyce sat down at the next station, her ears pricked at the woman’s declaration. When people make the point of saying they don’t want to talk about something, they usually really do.
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Joyce offered. And she was. She knew how tragedy could hang around your neck—your family’s neck—like a millstone.
The woman looked up at her, her blue eyes wide and searching. “Thank you. It’s been difficult.”
Joyce held her hands out across the table, and another young woman took them in hers and started to remove the chipping polish Joyce chose last time, and will choose again, because it’s her color. Cherry Bomb Red.
“We don’t want to pry,” the blonde’s nail technician said, keeping her eyes lowered and looking up through her lashes.
“Well, it’s just all so upsetting.” The blonde woman made to tuck her hair behind her ear, but stopped herself, realizing her polish would smear. Joyce noticed she’d chosen a dark purple. “You see, my brother and I were estranged. And then he sent this letter to me, totally out of the blue, telling me all about his life and certain—mistakes—he’d made.”
“And then, oh God, it was awful. I get a call from the police a few days later, before I even had a chance to reach out to him, and they tell me he’s dead.”
There’s an audible gasp across the nail salon, as though everyone stopped breathing at the same time.
“Oh, my dear,” one of the older nail techs said. “That’s terrible.”
The blonde woman rubbed her wrist under her eyes. “You don’t need to call me ‘dear’. Susan is fine.”
She sniffed, and a shudder went through her shoulders. “But it’s not just that he died before I could make amends with him.” She looked up and made eye contact with each of the women in the room, including Joyce.
And Joyce, as nasty as it sounds, had to stop and ask herself if perhaps this was some sort of performance. If perhaps this Susan had done this before. She’d seen it, in Simon’s practice. People who clung to tragedy, and fed off it in their own, maladjusted way.
Susan took a deep breath, as though to steady herself, and went on. “He didn’t just die. My brother was murdered.”
Joyce flinched at that word and accidentally knocked the bottle of nail polish over on her table, the creamy red spilling over the white surface like blood.
“I’m so sorry,” Joyce said, but this time she wasn’t sure she meant it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE TRINA
The meeting with the lawyer was pretty much the same as all the others Trina’d had in the past—too long and too expensive. Trina couldn’t decide if she liked the lawyer, this Blanche Grainger. She was all hairspray and shoulder pads, sat serenely at the head of the table with her arms crossed and a knowing look on her face.
She recommended Trina not talk to the police without her present. She had a few friends on the force, Blanche told Trina and Simon—because of course Simon was there, since he was paying for the meeting and keeping Blanche on retainer for Trina, and honestly that’s the least he could do for Trina after what he did to her life—and Blanche could put pressure for them to back off a little.
“I can’t influence an investigation, obviously.” Blanche looked solemnly at her two clients. “But, I can help maintain a quality of life for my client while the investigation is ongoing.”
Trina wasn’t sure what she meant by quality of life, but assumed it had something to do with keeping the police from showing up at her classes on campus or coming around for questions at her apartment in the middle of the night. Blanche could keep it all “respectable”, as Simon would say.
As they wrapped up, Blanche’s assistant came in with a questioning face and Trina swore she saw Blanche mouth the word “two” with her hot-pink lipstick as she held up two fingers. Trina checked her watch. They’d been there an hour and fifteen minutes, but it seemed Blanche rounded up when it came to fees. Trina just hoped Blanche wouldn’t have the same fuzzy math if she had to negotiate sentencing for Trina.
But that won’t happen. Trina won’t let herself even consider it. This all just needed to go away. Simon should just make it go away. He owed her that.
After the meeting, Simon settled the bill and they all dispersed to their separate channels of life. Outside in the parking lot, Simon moved as though to comfort Trina, and she shifted deftly away from him, climbed into her car, and drove off. They’d spoken enough for one day. He could go home, grab a snifter of whiskey, and feel good about himself for helping Trina.
Trina had other plans.
Monica’s warning from their conversation earlier kept ringing in her head. “He had enemies.” If Trina was going to get out of this mess, she needed to figure out who those enemies were. And to do that, she needed to learn more about Dermot.
She had a class tomorrow she needed to prepare for, because even though she was under investigation for murder the academic calendar does not stop turning and Trina couldn’t risk losing her job. Not now.
She headed back to campus, and by the time she walked the stairs to her office it was too late for her to turn onto another floor when she recognized a familiar voice.
“Oh, it’s you.” Addy Simpson looked just as uncomfortable to see Trina as Trina felt.
Just move on, Trina thought. She gave Addy a curt nod and kept walking up the stairs. Her side satchel felt heavier than usual, weighing down her shoulder so that she was lopsided and curvy-spined as she passed Addy.
The two hadn’t seen each other since the night in the bar, when Addy was drunkenly celebrating passing her dissertation defense and Trina had been doing her usual routine of trying to forget.
“Hang on, would you?” Addy held out a hand towards Trina. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Okay.” Trina turned and waited for Addy.
Addy looked around. A door opened and closed upstairs, and footsteps echoed in the stairwell. “Somewhere private?”
Trina glanced at her watch. She did not have time for this. “I have class in thirty minutes.” She didn’t add that she hadn’t reviewed her material for class yet.
“It won’t take long.” Addy went ahead of Trina, the two women walking in unspoken agreement up the stairs, into the third-floor hallway, and arrived at Trina’s office door.
Trina set her bag down and gave Addy a questioning look.
Addy’s dark hair was in braids today, with bright gold bands wrapped around a few of them. Her sweater flaunted a Fair Isle print, and paired with the slim jeans and knee-high boots she was wearing she could easily have been mistaken for an undergraduate rather than a freshly minted Ph.D.
“I wanted to apologize for what I said the last night.” Addy stared at a brown stain on the carpet. Trina couldn’t remember if it was coffee or whiskey. A blush rose on Addy’s cheeks as she continued. “I was celebrating a little too much.”
“We’ve all been there.”
Addy made a noncommittal noise.
And that’s when Trina remembered what Addy said to her.
“I knew Dermot,” Addy said, as if reading Trina’s thoughts. Addy twisted her hands in front of her like a nervous child. “He was a really good person.”
Trina looked at the young woman in front of her, not sure how to proceed. Eventually, she decided on just being honest.
“I didn’t know him that well, but I’m really sorry for what happened to him.”
